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Glimpses Of The Coming. 



GLIMPSES OF THE COMING. 



"Vet, Jesus said, not unto him — He shall not die; but — If I 
will that He tarry till I come." 



BY 



/ 



RICHARD GLEASON GREENE, 

Minister of Trinity Church, Orange, New Jersey. 




NEW YORK: 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 

900 BROADWAY. 






COPYRIGHT, 1877, BY 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY. 



B Library 
of Congress 

Washington 



EDWARD O. JENKINS, 

PRINTER AND STEREOTYPER, 

20 NORTH WILLIAM ST., N.Y. 



ROBERT RUTTER, 

BINDER, 

84 BEE KM AN ST., N. Y. 



Preface. 



PREFACE. 



This little book is large enough. To have right to 
be larger it would need to be a more thorough treat- 
ment of its great theme, concerning which it is only 
a series of hints. And for the arrangement of these, 
while a natural order has been sought, no attempt 
has been made toward a scientific method. 

It enters on no history of doctrine concerning the 
Second Coming of The Son Of Man ; it gives no 
analysis of any of the various systems of interpreting 
the prophecies, such as have been learnedly argued 
under the designations of literal, normal, figurative, 
spiritual, symbolical ; it attempts nothing on the se- 
ductive field of a specific reference of specific proph- 
ecies, each to its nation or its person on the scene 
of history — a field elaborately traversed by innumer- 
able explorers through paths interlacing or colliding ; 
it is not even devotional or practical in form, though 
it is hoped that a devout mind may find in it most 
practical suggestions ; it attempts no thorough exe- 



viii Preface. 

gesis of prophetic texts, which may be deemed a 
serious defect, though indeed it does seek to make 
audible at least the constant undertone of the grand 
Scriptural Anthem of The Coming, and to voice its 
one pervasive strain and to mark its rhythmic and 
unfaltering time. 

Certain principles herein stated can be shown to 
be grounded solidly on the Word of God : these 
must stand, whether with or against any learned 
theories of the Second Advent. Where, as at many 
points, this little treatise takes the form of an explor- 
ative hypothesis ranging out upon a vast mystery, 
the single question is — how closely the main lines of 
guidance and the holding-points revealed by The 
Holy Spirit, are adhered to? 

If the right or profit of hypothesis on this theme 
be questioned, the answer is instant — that Holy 
Scripture leaves us herein not without some ground 
of formulated thought, and in numerous passages 
invites us to search for it ; and that our search being 
tentative must be in the manner of hypothesis ; and 
that for us to speak slightingly of a reverent study 
of the prophecies, is to follow the fashion of an easy 
and shallow and not ancient piety, rather than to 
copy the Apostles and our Lord Himself, Who con- 



Preface. ix 

stantly hold up to view the Final Coming as the 
strong practical rebuke to worldliness and an inspira- 
tion to faith. The Church of our time stands in line 
of battle on the field of thought. It can not afford to 
discard this keen weapon of The Spirit. The Great 
Coming of The Lord, plainly taught in Holy Scrip- 
ture, scoffed at by unbelief, and half-doubted in vast 
sections of the very Church whose business on the 
earth is to wait for it and to hasten it, must be not 
only replaced in its rightful rank of truths, but must 
be newly set in such presentment and array as shall 
confront the unbelief of the times — unbelief which 
doubts the Lord's Coming as it doubts The Lord. 

The reason therefore for probing this theme in 
part with hypothesis is valid, even should any given 
hypothesis be found untenable. This treatise is an 
attempt to suggest a possible harmonizing of the two 
sharply divergent interpretations under which the 
Church has set fortfi the future Advent — thus a hum- 
ble contribution to unity among the Christian forces : 
it is also an attempt to set the Advent in terms of 
thought which can take their place not only in arbi- 
trary creeds, but in a cognizable system of history 
and of Nature — a system of unfailing laws. Let the 
theory now suggested be found as faulty on certain 



x Preface. 

points as it is confessedly incomplete in presentation : 
what then ? The failure is of small moment : at least 
some minds will have been stirred with suggestions, 
and the need will have been emphasized of some 
attempt which shall not fail, to set the Great Coming 
in such a harmony of Christian thought as shall 
suffice to bring its immense practical power to bear 
on individual experience and on the general thought 
and life. 

Since all our unity is in Christ, the Final Epoch 
which is our theme is herein treated as conceivable 
no other wise than as centralizing all its elements, 
principles and developments around and in the living 
and mighty Person of The Son Of God, The Eternal 
Word in Whom stands the whole life of humanity, 
past, present and to-come. For, it is possible that a 
treatment of the great Event not in the well-worn 
lines of either of the two great theories upon it, 
which have had such learned advocacy — but only as 
vitally and naturally connected with the Living 
Christ — may bring around it a fresh atmosphere 
favorable for thought. Those writers on the Second 
Advent seem most helpful to us who, with whatever 
theories, open it to us in its vital dynamics rather 
than as an outward mechanical operation. 



Preface. xi 

The author, undertaking this difficult theme not 
of his own motion, will be permitted to say that this 
treatise is published only by reason of the unexpect- 
ed and urgent request of a large company of minis- 
ters in the city of New York, before whom a general 
outline of the views here given had been (also upon 
special request) privately read by him. Let this, 
however, be plainly understood : he is not aware that 
any one of the many ministers before whom this 
view was presented in outline assents to it in detail ; 
he is not definitely informed that any of them accept 
it in even its general principles : he deems them 
responsible only for the judgment that in the present 
state of discussion, this view would be suggestive 
and helpful to further thought by other minds. 

In the main, the writer rests in the views advanced, 
deeming them agreeable with the Word of God and 
honorable to Christ. On the single point of the 
Resurrection, however, for the sake of a complete 
presentation of the hypothesis, some statements are 
made — somewhat positively in form — which while 
thought to be reconcilable with the general tenor of 
Holy Scripture, are confessed to be open to ques- 
tioning. Only the thorough criticism and exegesis 



xi i Preface. 

of a vast range of Scripture passages by those given 
to that special work can show the validity of these 
statements on the Resurrection. 

"To the Law and to the Testimony!" 



Contents. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 
THE SON OF MAN AS THE COMING ONE. 

I. The Son Of Man— The Life In The Written 
Word, 

II. The Son Of Man — The Divine Life In History, 

III. The Continuous Coming Of The Son Of Man 

IV. The Kingdom Of The Son Of Man, 
V. The Consummate Coming Of The Son Of Man 

VI. The Approach Of Th£ Son Of Man, 
VII. The Unknown Day Of The Son Of Man, 
VIII. Groups And Cycles Of Coming Events, 

IX. Crises And Epochs Of The Final Coming, 



i 

4 

8 

ii 

22 

24 
31 
34 

45 



PART II. 

THE MILLENNIAL COMING OF THE SON OF MAN. 

55 
I. Questions On Christ's Millennial Coming. . 59 



xvi Contents. 

The Series Of Questions Introduced. 
I. 
In the history of the Church of Christ, and of the world, is there 
an Epoch recognizably distinct, such as may be termed the 
Millennium? $9 

II. 
Through how long a period does the Millennium continue ? 
Rev. xx. 4-7 59 

III. 
Is that Manifestation of Christ predicted in Holy Scripture as 
His Second Coming, before or after the Millennium ? . 61 

IV. 
In what manner or degree is the Millennium a distinct ason or 
epoch? 61 

V. 

Is the Millennium a new Divine Dispensation as to principles 
and procedure ; or is it a prolongation and the consumma- 
tion of the Dispensation of The Holy Spirit ? . 62 

VI. 

Is the Millennium introduced, or does it proceed, by catastrophe, 
social, historical, material ? . . . . - .64 

VII. 

Is the Millennium ended by catastrophe, and by what? . 65 

VIII. 
What is the binding of Satan in the Abyss, during the Millen- 
nium ? Rev. xx. 1-3, 7. 8. : 66 



Contents. xvii 

IX. 

What are the chief moral and social characteristics of the Mil- 
lennium ? 70 

X. 

What are the physical characteristics of the Millennium ? . 72 

XL 

Is Christ's Millennial Coming and Reign real and personal — an 
actual efficiency on His part ; or does it consist merely in an 
increase of faith, love and zeal on the part of His Church ? 73 

XII. 

In Christ's Millennial Coming and Reign, is He in a body of 

flesh and blood ? 
Is He in any such body (not flesh and blood, but "glorified ") as 

is visible to the bodily eyes of men ? . . .74 

XIII. 

Is the Millennium an Epoch in the Church in the Heavens as 
well as to the Church on earth : and if so, what are the 
bearings of that fact ? Which is the sphere of its original 
and chief development ? Rev. xix. xx 78 

XIV. 

Is the Millennium introduced or accompanied by a Resurrec- 
tion? 

The First Resurrection — its nature, scene, subjects, period? 
Whether its subjects are visible on the earth in their pres- 
ence and reign with Christ ? Rev. xix. 1, 1 1-16 : xx. 4-6. 84 

II. General Survey Of Christ's Millennial Coming, ioi 



xviii Contents. 

PART III. 

THE COMING OF THE SON OF MAN IN FINAL 
JUDGMENT. 

I. The Culmination Of History, . . . .115 

II. The Supreme Crisis Veiled In Symbolism, . 120 

III. The Consummation Of Nature, . . . .127 

IV. The Ultimate Of Resurrection, . . .132 

V. The Consummate Personal Discrimination: . 136 
—To The Right-Hand Of The Son Of Man, 
—To The Left-Hand Of The Son Of Man. 



The Son Of Man As The Coming One. 



PART L 

THE SON OF MAN AS THE COMING ONE. 



i. 



THE SON OF MAN— THE LIFE IN THE WRITTEN 
WORD. 

TT 7E testify that the Holy Scripture is the Word of 
^* God. 

This is the unchanging testimony of Christ's Church 
to the changing centuries. The Church which has 
seen the rising, the fading, and the fall of all the 
greatest earthly things, has tested this one thing 
and found it permanent ; wherefore, it sets to its seal 
— That the Word of The Lord abideth forever. 

When we seek for the hiding-place of such endur- 
ing power, we find it where we find the secret of all 
power, in A Personal Life. Nothing but life can live. 
We think rightly of Holy Scripture, not when we 
consider it as a cabinet of precious abstract truths or 
as a code of high moral precepts ; but when we take it 



2 The Coming One. 

as the sure self-registering testimony of the progress 
with which that Life of God which is Personal in His 
Son, has been revealing itself through the long suc- 
cessions of human history. 

Thus, the Word comes to us, not as an oracle im- 
periously uttered out of a mystery, an intrusion upon 
man's nature and upon the whole flow of the world ; 
not even as an arbitrary Divine declaration for practi- 
cal benefit ; but as the living testimony of The Living 
God uttering itself through and in the life of man. 
From the beginning of the Old Testament to the clos- 
ing of the New, the Word is the written Revelation 
of Jesus Christ Who is the Living and Eternal Word 
of God made manifest in our Flesh ; it is His continu- 
ous translation of Himself as the Personal Divine 
Life, into human consciousness, perception, affection 
and action; it is one ever-growing story of His In- 
carnation ; it is the panorama of the Coming of The 
Son Of Man — of His first, and final, and countless in- 
termediate, comings. For, as Christ came in the 
Flesh by The Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, so — 
as the Universe at last shall see — by the power of the 
same Spirit He is to come in perfect glory, as the 
final issue and fruit from the long travail of the col- 
lective humanity: wherefore from the beginning ot 



The Life in The Word. 3 

the Gospel until now, and till The End when He 
shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God even 
The Father, His own chosen Name — Who might have 
called Himself " Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty 
God, The Everlasting Father" [Is. ix. 6], is this in- 

StCRQ 

"The Son Of Man." 



II. 



THE SON OF MAN — THE DIVINE LIFE IN HISTORY. 

The Son Of Man is The Son Of God — God in His 
whole unsearchable and eternal relation to humanity. 
We know man well enough to know practically, what- 
ever may be our theories, that the absolutely perfect 
and ideal Man must be necessarily and essentially Di- 
vine ; for though we deem our day the best, we have 
never seen that Man among those born of human 
parents. We know God sufficiently to know, that, 
while we may theorize concerning Him, we cannot 
know Him at all except as He presents Himself to 
our thought in relations and through a whole type 
of Being developed from our own humanity. What 
nation, what soul, has ever conceived of a God that 
was not in some sense a God-Man ? Rid theology of 
a Christ viewed as essentially God ; make Him only 
a high creature or a second God ; prove His proper 
Deity to be a logical impossibility, which can be done 
by any reasoner as easily as four-hundred years ago 
any philosopher could prove it absurd to say that the 

world is round : and you have simply removed the 
(4) 



The Divine Life in History. 5 

logical frame-work for man's conception of Deity, 
so that if man were to be limited by your arbitrary 
premises he would find it impossible to think of any 
Deity at all beyond a high creature or a second God ; 
but since man cannot permanently avoid framing a 
conception of God, you have done nothing after all 
but to confuse his mental machinery for an unavoida- 
ble conception; and sooner or later, a Christ as The 
God-Man is sure to return into human thought; as 
has been proved in history over and again. For He 
is God in manifestation. Jesus The Christ is God as 
known ; we have not seen beyond Him : and He says 
to us — " He that hath seen Me, hath seen The Father " 
[Jn. xiv. 9]. The Apostle Paul [Col. i. 15-17] declares 
Him to be "the Image of the invisible God," and 
that " by [Greek, in] Him were all things created that 
are in heaven and that are in [on] earth, visible and 
invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principali- 
ties or powers, all things were created by Him and 
for Him : and He is before all things and by [in] 
Him all things consist [subsist]. " Also, it is written 
[Heb. i. 3] that He is " the express image of God's 
Person — upholding all things by the word of His 
power." 

The Apostle John, opening his Gospel with sen- 



6 The Coming One. 

tences which in their measureless mystery and gran- 
deur are like echoes rolling in from Eternity, declares 
— " In the beginning was The Word, and The Word 
was with God, and The Word was God : the Same was 
in the beginning with God : all things were made by 
[through] Him, and without [except through] Him 
was not anything made that was [hath been] made. 
In Him was [is] life, and the life was the light of men. 
.... That was the true Light which lighteneth every 
man that cometh into the world. .... And The 
Word was made [became] Flesh, and dwelt [taber- 
nacled] among us" [Jn. i. 1-4, 9, 14]. In Holy Scrip- 
ture the Person of Christ is a mystery ; but concern- 
ing Him this one thing is made known to us with per- 
fect plainness — that the human race, whether in the 
body or dwelling in whatever spiritual sphere, and the 
whole moral, social, even physical world, are utterly 
given into the hands of Him Who called Himself The 
Son Of Man ; so that the creating of us is through 
His agency, and the Providential keeping and direct- 
ing of us is His office, and the redeeming and saving 
of us is His work, and the suffering with us and for 
our sins is claimed by Him as His strange privilege, 
and the supreme Kingship and Headship over us is 
His prerogative, and all judging of us is in Him, and 



The Divine Life in History. 7 

except through Him is nothing made or done that is 
made or done concerning us. 

The Christ is thus the operative force in all human 
history. History is, in its essence, the record of His 
continuous coming to man through innumerable Di- 
vine approaches, material, intellectual, moral ; with 
the record of man's active or passive reception of this 
personal Divine Life, or of man's repulsion or neglect 
of it. For while from the first moment of creation 
Christ comes to set up a Kingdom in love, man never- 
theless stands in moral liberty : hence are the tumultu- 
ous dashings, the refluent tides of good and evil, " the 
eternal outflow and recall " as of a throbbing ocean, 
the seeming retardations of the Kingdom, the world's 
memorable disasters when against the patient rock of 
Infinite Love the world mis-using its liberty and mass- 
ing its ungodly power, flings itself as a billow only 
to find itself broken and cast back in spray. Mean- 
time with silent, but ceaseless augmentation Christ 
rears His Kingdom ; and 

"The Testimony of Jesus is the spirit of 
Prophecy.'' 



III. 

THE CONTINUOUS COMING OF THE SON OF MAN. 

"The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy/' 
Since Christ's personal energy, vitalizing the moral, 
social, material world, and stirring as a deep life within 
all events, has been human history from the beginning, 
it is to be history till historic time shall end. Christ 
marshals the ages, future as well as past. Prophecy 
is history in the future tense. Therefore what- 
ever great things of the Kingdom are written in the 
prophets for our learning, are to be known by us only 
as seen in the light of the personal Presence of The 
Son Of God. Whether we contemplate Creation, In- 
carnation, Resurrection, Advent, Millennial Glory, 
or Final Judgment, we are looking not at epochs or 
events arbitrarily appointed and to emerge mechani- 
cally as by celestial clock-work when their hour shall 
strike ; but at certain natural processes or results of 
Christ's living energy. Each either is, or flows from, 
some manifestation of His Divine-Human personality 
on the field of man's character and career. These 

(8) 



The Continuous Coming. 9 

manifestations themselves are conditioned on a ter 
tain moral readiness in men to receive them ; also 
they correspond with a certain ripeness in the time 
and preparedness of all the accompanying events. 

In the eternal Counsel of God, which is mystery, 
are appointed these various conjunctures of outward 
events, of human action, of material, mental, moral 
forces ; still though thus rooted— rather, because thus 
rooted, in the Divine Sovereignty, they stand in an 
infinite fitness with the whole frame of things, and 
with the whole flow of history. Thus no coming or 
manifestation of Christ, from the least to the greatest, 
is ever hurried or hindered and so thrown out of time ; 
none is ever unnatural or disorderly however it may 
seem to us. Since all things were created through 
The Son Of God and subsist through Him, all things 
are administered by Him in perfect accordance with 
His own nature, and so in perfect adaptation of each 
part to every other. " He is the Head of all princi- 
pality and power" [Col. ii. 10]. And since, as He 
affirms [Mat. xxviii. 18] — "All power is given unto 
Me in heaven and in earth," we are to think of the 
invisible world as always moved from Him through 
all' its immeasurable bounds with action perfectly con- 
sentaneous and correspondent in its sphere with that 



io The Coming One. 

which in this material world proceeds from His ever- 
flowing, all-controlling Life. 

" It pleased The Father that in Jesus Christ should 
all fullness dwell,— and by Him to reconcile all things 
unto Himself; even by Him, whether they be things 
on earth or things in heaven " [Col. i. 19, 20]. Where- 
fore the Confession which The Master saith was re- 
vealed to His disciple Simon Peter not by man, but 
by The Father in Heaven, and on which as a Rock 
He would build His Church [Mat. xvi. 16-18], is our 
key for history and our light for prophecy, and links 
the Church on earth in one glorious hope with the 
Heavenly Jerusalem, while with united heart we cry — 

We confess Jesus The Christ, 
The Son Of The Living God ! 



IV. 

THE KINGDOM OF THE SON OF MAN. 

Jesus The Christ, The Son Of The Living God, is 
King. A King has a kingdom. What, where, and 
when, is it ? 

Various answers are heard. It is said to be a pres- 
ent kingdom in the hearts of His saints alone — its 
scene the true and vital Church below and above. It 
is said to have its present scene in the visible Church. 
It is said to be not present, but future ; He is waiting 
His appointed time to bring it in. It is said to be 
present in the Heavens, but future on the Earth when 
He shall be manifested in a glorious Presence here, 
and every eye shall see Him. It is said to consist in 
the willing obedience of His friends : it is said to con- 
sist in the submission by, or subjugation of, His foes« 
Is it not possible that each of these answers conveys, 
while it limits and reduces, the truth ? 

The Scriptures seem to show that Christ's Kingdom 
viewed not as a display, but as a reality, is in its scene 
and nature, universal ; and that as to its time, it em- 
(ii) 



12 The Coming One. 

braces all the Time there is, all epochs, ages, aeons, 
past, present and to come, of which man can conceive. 
[Eph. i. 20-22 : I Peter iii. 22 : Heb. i. 2, 3, 8 : Col. 
i. 16-19: ii. 9: 1 Cor. xv. 25 : Phil. ii. 9, 10.] All nat- 
ure is Christ's, all powers, all materials and elements, 
all bodies and all souls, all His friends and all His foes, 
all spiritual forces and physical laws. Nature, matter, 
space, time — these things that are so real to us, are 
real, but only as they are framed into the dimension, 
the order and sequence, of His Kingdom. Space is 
nothing but the extent of His domain : Time is noth- 
ing but the continuance of His dominion: both are 
conceptions mediated to our thought by The God- 
Man. The Son Of God is King in every way, every- 
where, and all the time. Where His Kingdom seems 
incomplete, is only where our vision of it is incom- 
plete : while it seems to us to be waiting to be set up, 
it is already set up of old ; only we are waiting for the 
spiritual illumination to see it. Its methods indeed 
change with the changing epochs; it projects itself 
upon an evil world through dispensation after dis- 
pensation, and these grow in a glory of Divine mani- 
festation ; but the Kingdom is something more than 
its manifestation to men's eyes, and is as real when 
ungodly hearts reject it and tempt the long suffering 



The Kingdom. 13 

of the patient King, as when they accept it, or as 
when they are crushed beneath it. 

Christ, " the Same yesterday, to-day and forever," 
is always the Coming One, always the Reigning One ; 
using all diverse methods of approach and govern- 
ance ; not indeed recognized in His Kingship when 
aforetime He meekly tabernacled in the Flesh ; not 
recognized even to-day save by the men of faith ; yet 
none the less The King when He stood before Ponti- 
us Pilate's bar (where also He confessed Himself The 
King), none the less The King when He was throned 
upon the Gross (which also by its title confessed Him 
King) — none the less than He shall be when, mani- 
fested in awful glory on the great white Throne, He 
shall come on the clouds of heaven in the final Day. 

From an ancient wall in Siena, a marvellous 
fresco looks forth. It shows The Christ Desolate. 
Weary and worn, He is bound to a pillar, bleeding 
from the scourge, fainting, with no friendly uphold- 
ing save that of the cords that bind Him. The igno- 
minious pillar seems His only friend. In prospect is 
the Cross. With utter physical exhaustion and agony, 
there is absolute loneliness and desertion as of One 
Forsaken on the earth and in the heavens. Yet the 
beholder finds prevalent through all the unspeakable 



14 The Coming One. 

sadness, a mysterious majesty in The Man, visibly 
such as may be conceived of in One throned at the 
right hand of Power. Meekness and majesty, suffer- 
ing and glory, earthly shame and eternal might — these 
are not incongruous except to the eyes that are so 
filmed with the material that the soul of fact re- 
mains unseen. The picture is no proof, but it is 
an illustration. If Art can conceive, if hands can 
trace, such Kingship in such weakness, then surely 
a spiritual faith may cry even at front of Calvary, 
This Man is The Son Of God, therefore The King, 
Prince of a power that knows neither beginning 
nor end. 

If to this whole view it be objected that our Lord 
and various inspired men spoke of the Kingdom of 
God as "to come/' as "near," as "at hand " — either 
affirming that it could not be entered except in a 
child-like character and a life of Christian discipleship 
— or pointing to it as to be brought in w r ith power in 
latter days — thus showing it as not yet established in 
such present and universal dominion as is claimed 
above ; the answer is not difficult. To examine the 
passages of Scripture which refer to the Kingdom, re- 
quires a thoroughness which this little treatise does 
not attempt. But it is thought that anv one examin- 



The Kingdom. 15 

ing them all in their general harmony may see that 
those Scriptures which require a certain character of 
discipleship for entrance into the Kingdom, make this 
requirement not as a condition for the existence of 
the Kingdom, but as the condition on which men 
may share in its glorious power and blessing; and 
that those Scriptures which seem to remit the King- 
dom to the day of Christ's future coming to intro- 
duce the Millennium, are naturally and completely 
explicable as referring not to the reality of the King- 
dom or to anything essential in it, but to its height- 
ened manifestation and to its consummating develop- 
ment under the later and* fuller revelation within it 
of its King. Not in its substantial fact, but merely 
in a certain specific form is it represented as delayed : 
and if it be alleged that this future specific form or 
visible development of the Kingdom is so mighty as 
to be the very Kingdom itself to which prophecy re- 
fers ; it is to be replied that while prophecy may 
indeed refer to a form, we have no warrant in the 
character of Christ for reducing to any external form 
or visible development however glorious, a fact which 
He Himself plainly sets forth as spiritual in it's origin 
and nature: for He saith [Lk. xvii. 20, 21] when in- 
quired of by the Pharisees what time the Kingdom 



i6. The Coming One. 

of God should come — " The Kingdom of God cometh 
not with observation : neither shall they say, Lo here ! 
or Lo there ! for behold the Kingdom of God is with- 
in [in the midst of] you." 

And if it be alleged that certain Scriptures show 
a Kingdom of Christ as beginning in the course of 
history — dating only from His Ascension above all 
heavens as the crucified Son Of Man risen from the 
dead; then without disputing such a Scriptural pre- 
sentation as to the form of the Kingdom, we may re- 
ply that even this shows the Kingdom as already set 
up. We are not awaiting it now. 

It is sometimes said in the use of an analogy drawn 
from human governments — as though they were deli- 
cate and exquisitely perfect or quite satisfactory im- 
ages of God's dominion — that Christ is King in law y 
but not yet in fact. This only confuses the Divine 
authority and power with the human love and will- 
ingness. In Scripture Christ appears as Supreme in 
law, and in fact, and in every other conceivable range 
of relations: even the demons are subject unto Him. 
But if it be alleged that the Kingdom as to a certain 
form is in Holy Scripture expressly conditioned upon 
a coming of Christ ; then it is to be conceded that 
this is true ; and that Christ's comings are represented 



The Kingdom. 17 

as repeating themselves along all the path of human 
history — each advent bringing in a new historical de- 
velopment of His kingly judicial power [Jn. xii. 31 : 
ix. 39] : wherefore, as it will be attempted to show 
hereafter, His final Coming will indeed consummate 
His Kingdom in its highest form and its grandest 
scope. 

But in fully conceding this, nothing is conceded as 
to the Kingdom being not yet set up on earth in all 
its essential majesty and dominion ; and nothing is 
conceded as to any setting aside of the work of The 
Holy Spirit and putting in its place Christ's bodily 
presence, in establishing Christ's dominion among 
men, before the final judgment-hour: for nothing of 
this sort is either naturally involved in Christ's Com- 
ing, or warranted in Holy Scripture. The Spirit of 
God convicts of sin, shows Christ to men, gathers the 
Household of faith, and convinces of Judgment to 
come, until in Christ's final utmost manifestation 
through the same Spirit the last Judgment that was 
to come shall have fully come [Jn. xiv. 16, 26 : xvi. 

7-iS]. 

: We look for a Kingdom to come : it is well ; every 
eye shall yet see it: but let us not fail to see also that 
the Kingdom already is. It always is, and always it 



1 8 The Coming One. 

is coming more and more ; only its manifestation is 
delayed. Why, except to prop some theory as to the 
scene or manner of Christ's Advent that cannot stand 
on Holy Scripture alone, should those who have learn- 
ing and ingenuity use them to show that the King- 
dom of Christ is not to be on earth until some later 
Advent sets it up ? Because foes and rebellion are 
rampant, shall we therefore say that there is no gov- 
ernment in the land, while we behold the law always 
invincible in its might, and the vast marching armies 
of justice, and the domain of peace steadily broaden- 
ing, and the hostile noise and fret all vain, and the civil 
power ready when its own chosen time shall come to 
crush all opposition into dust ? Because the morning 
Sun casts only level beams through the Eastern gate 
of its coming, shall we deny that there is yet sun- 
rising or day, and teach that no great achievement in 
affairs is possible till noon? 

Against all these our human theorizings, hear The 
Lord Jesus saying to His disciples after His Resur- 
rection — "All power is given unto Me in heaven and 
in earth" [Mat. xxviii. 18]; and then proceeding 
[19, 20] to issue His commands in instant exercise of 
the supremacy which He claimed. Hear Him saying 
to His Apostle John in Patmos — " I am set down with 



The Kingdom. 19 

My Father on His throne " [Rev. 111. 21]. Against the 
theory that Christ's Kingdom is not to be a Kingdom 
on the earth until it shall have fully come into its 
manifestation which can be only at His personal com- 
ing to destroy His foes, let Paul the Apostle speak 
[1 Cor. xv. 25] — " He must reign till [not after, but 
" till"] He hath put all enemies under His feet : " — 
"Then cometh The End, when He shall have de- 
livered up the Kingdom to God even The Father: 
when He shall have put down all rule and all au- 
thority and power" [24: also see verse 28]. The 
Apostle's view is very plain : he saw Christ as reign- 
ing 1 800 years ago: he expected Him to reign till the 
consummation of all things concerning man : thus in- 
stead of dating the beginning of the Mediatorial King- 
dom at Christ's subjugation of His foes, he dates the 
end of the Kingdom at that subjugation. 

The Mediatorial Kingdom — or let us say, the King- 
dom of Christ on earth, is in full flow of power to- 
day: it is administered as the dispensation of The 
Holy Ghost Who works in human hearts the ever- 
progressive revelation of The Son Of God : its very 
genius and idea is not absolute undisputed triumph, 
but struggle after struggle issuing in victory ever rising 
and spreading, under Christ's meek majestic leader- 



2o The Coming One. 

ship: it is a Kingdom of efforts, conflicts, growths r 
its parables, from the King's own lips, are the sowing 
of seed in the field — even a grain of mustard seed, 
and the hiding of leaven in the meaL So far is it 
from waiting for the full manifestation of The Lord 
in triumph over all hostile powers, before it begins to 
be, that thereupon instead it shall merge itself, as 
a specific administrative form, into that mystery of 
Glory, the ultimate " Kingdom of God even the 
Father/' "that God maybe all in all." Soon as it 
gains its ultimate triumph it ceases by its own inevi- 
table law. The Mediatorial Kingdom — likewise the 
Kingdom of Heaven on earth— stands in the sweet 
similitude of its King, The Man Christ Jesus: to the 
very last it shall be true to the mind that was in Him : 
cradled in meekness it shall prove that meekness is 
might; winning through suffering it rises to power ; 
it rules all through serving all; unselfish, it shall not 
rest in its own glorification as its object, but shall 
claim and take its glory only as mediative and tran- 
sitional to a glory beyond all glory in the unsearcha- 
ble deep of the Divine Being ; at last ascendant above 
all heavenly powers, in the very instant of its con- 
summation it shall vanish from all created sight, and 
all the hearts that, winged with love, are borne up 



The Kingdom. 21 

with it on its strong ascent, shall find themselves and 
it transfigured, in the Eternal Light, and God The 
All In All. 

So Christ shall bring His People home. 



THE CONSUMMATE COMING OF THE SON OF MAN. 

That Christ may bring His people home, He will 
come for them. For He saith — " I go to prepare a 
place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for 
you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; 
that where I am, there ye may be also " [Jn. xiv. 2, 3]. 
So we are, or we should be, looking for an actual per- 
sonal as well as for a comprehensive constant Coming 
of The Son Of Man. [See Scripture references near 
the beginning of VII.] 

But if we make this plain promise of a personal 
Coming, to be predictive of a material manifestation 
of Christ, or of any coming which is to be visible in 
form to mens bodily eyes, it is our own promise that 
we hear, not Christ's. This point awaits fuller state- 
ment; but it may now be noted that if The Lord, 
consoling His troubled Twelve with these words in 
view of His "going away" from them, promised 
them that He would return in a form visible to their 

bodily eyes that He might take them (the twelve) to 

(22) 



The Consummate Coming. 23 

be with Himself, He did not fulfill the solemn prom- 
ise : He has broken the hope which He gave. Some 
other style and sphere of His personal Coming must 
therefore be assigned ; seeking for which, we may 
strike upon this oft-forgotten truth— that full person- 
ality does not at all depend on, or in any manner require, 
a material visibility, though it does tend to produce im- 
mense results in the material realm. 

As to the personal Coming, we must hold it in its 
fullest and most real sense, if we hold the New Testa- 
ment. The final Advent is nothing other than the 
consummated personal presence of The Son Of God 
in, with and through the whole humanity and all the 
spheres with which man stands in organic connection. 
In this directly personal and fully manifested energy 
of the King, first to His people, through them to the 
Race and even to the outward world, stands that final 
development of the renewing, sanctifying, governing 
and judicial forces of the Gospel which we are wont 
to speak of as the Kingdom to come, the Millennium, 
the Glory of the Latter Day. 



VI. 

THE APPROACH OF THE SON OF MAN. 

The Glory of the Latter Day is the far-shining 
light in prophecy. The promise of the great King- 
dom is Zion's steadfast hope. The Church waiting 
for her Lord, while the unbelieving world has been 
revelling or sleeping through the long night of his- 
tory, has trimmed the lamp of this Divine promise 
whose flame often flickering in rude winds has never 
quite gone out. " What of the night ? " has been 
the cry upon the walls of Zion, age after age : " The 
night passeth; The Lord cometh ! " has been the 
answer of the watchmen on the eastward towers that 
stand facing the hope of dawn. 

As there must be dawn before day, so — speaking 
now according to the eyes of men — The Lord's ap- 
proach must be before His arrival. It is His nearer: 
coming that in these last days is kindling the Church 
to new hope and effort. Perhaps we mistake the 
signs of the times : wiser men than we, in other 

days, have mis-read them, and have thought that 
(24) 



The Approach. 25 

they heard the footstep of the Beloved at the thres- 
hold of the door, when it was only the eager throb- 
bing of their desires within them. They have now 
gone up to higher courts of the same great Zion — - 
courts invisible as yet to us— in which as those that 
have been brought part-way to meet and greet their 
King, they have a nearer, earlier vision of His Com- 
ing. Far through the night and on swift-wing, as 
led of angels, they have been borne, until, though 
not yet in the full Day, but only in its faint morning 
flush, they nevertheless find their horizon brimming 
with a light from the presence of The Lord, which 
doubtless makes more than all the Heaven which 
they ever had conceived while in the Flesh. 

Meanwhile on earth the Kingdom grows with the 
constant coming of the King. Its last grand mani- 
festation advances. The earthly times are flowing 
toward it as all the rivers are flowing to lose them- 
selves in the measureless sea. To it Providences 
have been working and histories converging since 
God began to develop man's redemption close upon 
man's first fall. Great changes in preparation for 
this consummation are going on before our eyes. 
We are so accustomed to material achievements that 
have been crowding the last half century, that we 



26 The Coming One. 

take small note of things which, four-hundred or 
one-hundred years ago, would have covered the world 
with amazement. Matter is being steadily subjuga- 
ted to the uses of man's spiritual nature. Whereas 
the ancients dealt with force mostly in its gross 
material forms, we summon to our service the sub- 
tlest, most ethereal agencies — steam, magnetism, 
light : we are gradually transferring our life at least 
in possibility to a . sphere not nearer to, but in 
nearer symbolism of, the spiritual. Laboring men 
of to-day are served by more delicate machineries of 
comfort and use than any monarch in Europe could 
have commanded five centuries ago. 

All this progress, under a general law moreover of 
acceleration, is toward something. Toward what? 
Doubtless to mere material achievements as the 
nearest stages of advance, but necessarily to some- 
what beyond these. Matter is not ultimate. The 
way of The Lord is being prepared; how or pre- 
cisely whither we may not know : but the mountains 
are being brought down, and the valleys raised, and 
the highway of the King is being cast up, and His 
salvation shall go forth thereon, and all Flesh shall 
see it together. Even man's selfishness is being 
over-ruled for this work ; and though as yet we see- 



The Approach. 27 

only the confused materials, the disjointed prepara- 
tions, and often a present growth of evil availing 
itself of that very increase of powers which God had 
prepared for good — though as yet refinement may 
mean selfishness, and science may foster pride. — 
nevertheless these are but incidents of God's great 
plan for the coming of that Kingdom of His Son 
w r hich is surer than the revolution of the Planet. 

Christ The Light has come to more hearts and 
wider lands since this century opened than in all pre- 
vious centuries since the Apostles left the earth. All 
national doors stand open now for the heralds of the 
Gospel ; old barriers crumble ; the idols tremble in 
their shrines; the social and moral foundations of 
heathenism are being undermined. The Gospel as a 
leaven has been cast into the social life of many 
lands. The nations are being fused together as never 
before. The very winds carry ideas abroad like 
winged seeds. Ships heavy laden on the seas bear 
heavier and more forceful moral cargo. The ancient 
abuses of Christendom are being brought into sterner 
judgment than of old : there is cleaner private senti- 
ment ; there is nobler growth of laws. The common 
man grows somewhat kingly and judicial. The long- 
dismembered Church of Christ is visibly drawing 



28 The Coming One. 

toward unity. Multitudes of souls in many lands 
are rising to Christian faith. It is computed by those 
who study statistics that such rate of progress as has 
been made in these few years past, if continued (a 
-mere supposition) would in much less than a century 
spread Christianity over the globe in as full power as 
that with which it now holds nominal Christendom. 
And we are to expect greater things than these, 
knowing that it is in the gift of The Holy Ghost to 
give vast increase of faith and prayer and so of 
Christian power and success above all that is known 
by the Church to-day. 

There are those who think our day degenerate, the 
type of piety feeble, the Church a vast worldly com- 
promise, all institutions and society itself eaten at 
the heart with an incurable moral decay, the world 
staggering to its last convulsive fall — the only hope 
a bodily coming of Christ instead of the worn-out 
Dispensation of The Spirit. Those who thus con- 
demn our times in comparison with any that have pre- 
ceded, are safe from all argument, and absolutely im- 
pregnable to reason ; for such assertions are not in any 
sphere in which reason can conceivably move. But 
jthe question is one of fact, which any man can decide 
for himself. There are many things which this little 



The Approach. 29 

treatise desires to assert modestly ; but as to this 
easy, pious, cheap condemnation of the manhood 
and of the Christian faith and labor of our times, let 
it be declared a wholesale mis-representation of the 
Church of God. We would declare it a calumny on 
the whole Household of Christ, were we not afraid 
to bring railing accusation. May The Lord in love 
rebuke it ! The brethren whose zeal for a certain 
interpretation of prophecy has led them into this 
most un-Christlike judgment of their brethren and 
distrust of the power of The Holy Ghost, deserve 
that they should have been compelled to live in some 
of those centuries past which they hold so superior 
to our own. 

Whether the latter glory be near to or far from 
this our day, we know not ; but that it comes, and 
comes with Christ in some grander and fuller devel- 
opment of His personal life ministered by The 
Holy Ghost to the Church, and through the Church 
to the whole humanity, we know. That Kingdom, 
meek and unobtrusive, but therefore mighty ; coming 
not with observation ; decked in no vulgar pomp or 
cheap bedizenment, ritual, ecclesiastical, political ; 
rising as the Summer comes on the broad lands with 
a growing and all-pervasive and irresistible presence 



30 The Coming One. 

— that Kingdom preparing over the earth and in the 
skies; urged forward by all faithful hands of the 
children of God ; upbuilded by the ministrations of 
angels — its foundations deep in God's eternal Grace 
— its walls rising to the sound of Divine harmonies, 
and towering with an immovable and everlasting 
strength — its dimly glorious outline hanging since 
the earliest ages like a beautiful dream on the hori- 
zon of the world's hope, and glowing in these last 
days with more substantial light in our more favored 
skies — drawing by invisible most -potent attractions 
all elements that are noblest and divine from all the 
ages of our thronging, many-colored humanity — that 
Kingdom is gathering its citizens and establishing its 
order and evolving its universal power, through every 
moment in every land beneath the sun, in the mighty 
Name of Christ its King and by The Spirit of The 
Living God. 

If it tarry, wait for it, and work. For we are 
workers in it, together with God. Its tarrying is 
only a seeming : 

Its Going Forth is Prepared as the Morning. 



VII. 

THE UNKNOWN DAY OF THE SON OF MAN. 

The going forth of the morning is from the very- 
point of midnight. From the deep of the dark a new 
day begins, and expectation kindles. 

Nothing appears with more positiveness in the let- 
ters of Christ's Apostles to the churches than their 
expectation of a Second Great Coming of their Lord 
— His final Advent to His Church and to the World. 
The Master had unequivocally announced it to them, 
and amid their trials and persecutions it was cherished 
as the precious hope. Often they assert it with cir- 
cumstantial and unqualified prediction : while in 
countless instances they frame their thought and 
order their argument and point their appeal with 
reference to it. Were they not assured of such a per- 
sonal Coming large portions of their epistles would 
be nonsense. [Mk. xiii. 26: Acts i. 1 1 : 1 Cor. iv. 5 : 
xv. 23: Phil. ii. 16: iii. 20: I Thess. i. 10: ii. 19: iii. 
13: iv. 15-17: v. 23: Tit. ii. 13: Heb. ix. 28: x. 37: 

1 Pet. v. 4: Rev. i. 7: xxii. 20]. 

(31) 



32 The Coming One. 

Yet with all this positiveness, the result of a vision 
by which their spiritual eyes were continually opened 
upon that Day of The Lord, there is a restraint of 
statement as to particulars, and a plain limitation of 
knowledge regarding the time of the great Event — 
thus making good The Lord's own word, that of that 
Day and Hour knoweth no man, or angel in the 
heavens [Mat. xxiv. 36]. The utmost that we can 
gather from the New Testament as to time, enables 
us only to discern indications of the order in which 
the grand closing scenes of the world's history are 
to emerge; and for even so little as this we have no 
clear revelation, but only a dim outline pictured on 
the skies of the vast hereafter — outline wavering, 
vanishing, re-appearing, bewildering our gaze. Yet 
we may know that God would not have caused so 
much, or so little, to be revealed to us, if He had not 
purposed thereby to draw our thought to these stu- 
pendous themes and to call into exercise our faculties 
of reason and investigation and even imagination, all 
which faculties we are to employ humbly, modestly, 
reverently, though earnestly — being cautious not to 
label our wise theories knowledge, and not to assert 
our probable conjectures as teachings of Holy Scrip- 
ture — being further cautious to frame no theories 



The Unknown Day. 33 

which to our best judgment are not direct inferences 
from the Word of God. For there is great danger, 
which has again and again been encountered by the 
Church, that in dealing with scenes so fascinating by 
their grandeur, their mystery, and their relation to 
each of us who are to have some share in them, the 
imagination unduly excited may break loose into va- 
garies and drag us into that fanaticism which is the 
fever of faith as it is the paralysis of common sense. 
We are to "know this first" [2 Pet. i. 20] — applica- 
ble primarily to the prophets interpreting their utter- 
ances to themselves ; still more for us — " That no 
prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpreta- 
tion." 

2* 



VIIL 

GROUPS AND CYCLES OF COMING EVENTS. 

The prophecies are to be interpreted not each pri- 
vately, but each in harmony with the whole body of 
revelation ; and those which refer to epochs future 
to us, are to have an interpretation consonant to that 
which is supplied by the fulfillment of those that have 
been fulfilled. 

Before proceeding to that general view of the Sec- 
ond Coming in its main epochs which is all that is 
now proposed, we need to recognize some principles 
as to the mode of prophetic revelation which, rightly 
applied, will relieve our minds of difficulties otherwise 
unmanageable. These principles are well-known by 
all students of the Bible : only the extent of their 
application is in question. They pertain to the group- 
ing of events in prophecy. 

We are to bear in mind that what Stier calls " the 

perspective of prophecy " is not given us in the Word, 

but is for the most part left for us who read it to sup- 

plvfor ourselves by comparing one part of these mys- 
(34) 



Groups and Cycles. 35 

terious Scriptures with another. The prophets saw 
and revealed the future with a vision which usually 
took small note of the element of time, or of the in- 
tervals which were to separate the successive events. 
To their eyes the things so distantly seen were often 
grouped as though all occurring at one crisis ; whereas 
the different events in such a group are in their occur- 
rence separated by great spaces of time. This has been 
well compared to the view which we have of a dis- 
tant mountain range, which, seen afar, shows against 
the sky as but a single broad-swelling and towering 
eminence : whereas when we journey to it and begin 
the ascent, we find hills upon hills with deep chasms 
or smiling valleys between, and mountains piled be- 
yond mountains among which rivers thread their 
way while villages nestle at their feet. So the grand 
final events stand as lofty mountain-barriers on the 
horizon of our world's history, black with storms, or 
smoking with the nether fires, or snow-white and 
gleaming with the light which they catch from the 
infinite heaven beyond and fling to our straining eyes 
afar in the paths of this pilgrim-life. 

To the prophets themselves it was given to see, at 
least to reveal, not the precise order, proportion, per- 
spective of that long vista down which they gazed : 



36 The Coming One. 

wherefore as the Apostle Peter declares concerning 
those of the old Dispensation, they were ever " search- 
ing what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ 
Who was in them did signify when it testified before- 
hand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should 
follow'' [1 Pet. i. 10, 11]. This leads us to recall those 
elder prophecies of the Messiah that was to come, in 
which He was pictured in His humiliation at the first 
Advent and in His glorification at the second Advent 
both at once as though the two Advents were but 
one (as indeed in a profound philosophical sense they 
are), with no note whatever of all these centuries of 
ours that are intervening in parenthesis between 
the two — a grouping of events and a disregard of 
time which, as we know, the Jews of Christ's day 
mis-interpreted in their hasty pride and their trust in 
the external and visible, so that they looked not at 
all for a meek and suffering, but only for an instantly 
and outwardly glorified Messiah. This may suggest 
to us the possibility of our making a similar though 
less momentous mistake in reading the prophecies of 
Christ's Second Advent — viewing it as all to be com- 
pleted in one great crisis, when perhaps it may con- 
sist of crises separate and cumulative — viewing it as 
all to be limited within one sphere, the earthly, when 



Groups and Cycles. 37 

perhaps it may develop itself also and even originally 
and far more mightily in the Heavens. Concerning 
this we have this suggestive thought from that noble 
Christian scholar, Dean Alford, of whom we joy to 
think as now a member of the Church on high, who 
says — "The coming again of The Lord is not one 
single act, as His Resurrection, or the descent of The 
Spirit, or His second personal Advent, or the final 
Coming to Judgment ; but the great complex of all 
these, the result of which shall be His taking His 
people to Himself to be where He is. This receiv- 
ing is begun in His Resurrection, carried on in the 
spiritual life, .... further advanced when each by 
death is fetched away to be with Him [Phil. i. 23], 
fully completed at His Coming in glory, when they 
shall forever be with Him [1 Thess. iv. 17] in the per- 
fected Resurrection state." 

We are further to have in mind a feature of these 
prophecies cognate to the one above indicated, which 
consists in their combining in one prediction recur- 
ring cycles of events. One event is prophesied and no 
other may be in terms alluded to ; yet that one event 
is the picture or type of another event somewhat simi- 
lar in its principles or its bearing, which is to follow 
the first after an interval of hundreds or thousands of 



38 The Coming One. 

years. Sometimes one predicted event is thus the 
symbol of many events that are to occur in cycle 
after cycle of history — each successive cycle repeat- 
ing the fundamental principle of the first, but with 
varying and often with augmenting grandeur and 
scope. It has been noted from of old that history 
moves in circuits which involve essentially the same 
deep moral and social elements over and over again 
with circumstantial changes; and since prophecy is 
history anticipated, prophecy must move by the same 
great law. It is a far-reaching law with scope too 
vast for our present tracing : suffice it to say that in 
a certain sense with careful restrictions on our errant 
fancy, we may conceive of cycles of minor Advents 
of The Son Of Man, of cycles of minor Apostasies, of 
cycles of preparative Resurrections, of cycles of pre- 
liminary Judgment Days — all which events, minor, 
and not consummate, are yet real enough and re- 
semble the final in source and principle sufficiently to 
stand for types and premonitions of those which shall 
be ultimate and shall exhaust the full meanirtg of the 
prophecy. 

As was remarked above, our application of this 
principle of viewing great prophetic events in cycles, 
is in danger of being fanciful ; but the principle itself 



Groups and Cycles. 39 

is indisputable, standing squarely on the authority of 
The Lord Jesus Himself, who predicted to His disci- 
ples the two analogous yet widely separated events — 
the end of the Hebrew theocracy in the destruction 
of Jerusalem and its temple, and the end of the world 
itself in His last judicial coming — combining the two 
as though they were but one, in terms which until He 
explained them were actually taken by His hearers 
as indicative of but one crisis. 

This feature of a cyclical and recurrent reference in 
the prophecies is so important by reason of its wide 
range and of the possible number of the instances in 
which it is applicable that it may be helpful to trace 
in some detail the illustration of it which is furnished 
by our Lord's wonderful prediction above referred to 
[Mat. xxiii., xxiv., xxv. : Lk. xxi.]. 

The Master stood in the Temple discoursing to 
the multitude, the third day before His Crucifixion, 
while the rulers were plotting His death. The hour 
had come for Him to announce the end of the dis- 
pensation of types and shadows and to unveil the 
spiritual nature of His Kingdom. Upon the Scribes 
and Pharisees He denounces the awful judgment of 
God for their hypocrisy — " Verily, I say unto you, 
All these things shall come upon this generation." 



40 The Coming One. 

" Behold, your house [the temple, ' your house/ no 
longer My Father's House] is left unto you desolate " 
[xxiii. 36, 38]. He turns rejected, and leading His 
few disciples forth, departs forever from the sacred 
courts. 

The little company, amazed and saddened at His 
predictions of terrible desolation for their venerated 
national sanctuary, hoping perhaps to intercede for 
its safety amid the approaching ruin, stay His depart- 
ing footsteps that they may turn His attention to the 
wondrous pile forth from whose courts He goes. It 
was the last and grandest of the three successive tem- 
ples which had now for a thousand years, with inter- 
missions of national disaster, cast their consecrating 
shadow from Mount Moriah, and centralized within 
their precincts all the visible earthly worship of the 
One Living God. It had been the spot of God's visi- 
ble glory: it was the memorial of a national history 
whose source was in the remote antiquity of the Patri- 
archal ages, and whose progress through the long cen- 
turies had been led by God's most stupendous Provi- 
dences ; it was the organic centre of the Theocracy ; it 
was the symbol of that revelation of Jehovah to man 
which alone in the generations had proved itself able 
to withstand the idolatry that had made of every 



Groups and Cycles. 41 

other nation under heaven first an unendurable pollu- 
tion, then an awful desolation. Around its innermost 
shrine, the Holy of Holies, which probably repro- 
duced with enlargement the Asiatic architecture tra- 
ditional from the previous temples of Solomon and 
Zerubbabel, Herod the Great holding the Jewish 
Kingdom in the name of Rome, had reared upon the 
terraced height, courts, cloisters, colonnades, inner 
and outer porticoes, and walls of fortification, adorned 
with Grecian and Roman art — grand, vast, beautiful, 
beyond all that could have been achieved in the 
simplicity of the ruder ages that had gone before. 
Josephus, to whose eyes it was a daily sight, gives as 
dimensions of some of its stones, seventy feet in 
length, eight feet in height, nine feet in breadth. 

And Jesus of Nazareth stood, the plain, meek 
Man Who had not where to lay His head, and said 
— " See ye not all these things ? Verily, I say unto 
you, There shall not be left here one stone upon 
another that shall not be thrown down " [xxiv. 2]. 
Amazing prediction ! For, the temple though gar- 
nering the memories of a far antiquity, was yet in its 
material structure, new. Nearly fifty years had it 
now been building, and it was not completed till 
about fifteen years after Christ spoke these words. 



42 The Coming One. 

It was a time of profound peace ; no speck of war 
was in the skies of the Holy Land : yet The Lord, 
after a brief interval in the dialogue, testified that 
Jerusalem and its sacred House should be destroyed 
before that generation should pass away [xxiv. 34]. 
Multitudes of those who thronged the temple-courts 
on the day that Christ uttered this prediction to four 
of His disciples, lived to see Israel's light quenched 
utterly in blood, the Theocracy abolished, the pal- 
aces of her princes crashing in conflagration, and the 
temple, her glory and her pride, heaped into indis- 
tinguishable ruin, at the close of a siege whose suffer- 
ing and horror it is scarcely in the human imagina- 
tion to surpass. 

" Tell us, when shall these things be, and what 
shall be the sign of Thy Coming and of the end of 
the world ?"' Thus the bewildered disciples ques- 
tioned, privately, when shortly afterward they had 
come to the Mount of Olives [xxiv. 3]. The Lord 
then opens to them that the end of all things is not 
yet ; that the temple is to be laid waste by war [Lk. 
xxi. 20] ; that the end is only then to be begun [Mat. 
xxiv. 6, 8] ; that Jerusalem shall be trodden down of 
the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles shall be 
fulfilled [Lk. xxi. 24] ; that first the good news of 



Groups and Cycles. 43 

the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a 
witness unto all nations ; and then shall the end 
come [Mat. xxiv. 14]. He proceeds to amplify the 
prophecy with details now of the destruction of 
Jerusalem, now of His final Coming [xxiv., xxv.] : He 
interweaves the two in one fabric of anticipation : 
the two events so widely separate in point of time, 
He unqualifiedly co-ordinates in point of their source, 
their meaning, their fundamental principle ; making 
the first and least of the two to be the token, the 
type, even the actual beginning, of that great Day 
when " shall appear the Sign of The Son Of Man in 
heaven, and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn 
[as with funeral lament or the lament for an expiring 
world], and they shall see The Son Of Man coming 
in [on] the clouds of heaven with power and great 
glory" [xxiv. 30: also 31, 34, 36, etc.]. 

Thus in a sense, " Judgment was to begin at the 
house of God " ; and Christ's Advent in its minor 
developments, in the far-off world-shaking steps of 
its approach, was to be during that generation [Jn. 
xii. 31 : xvi. 11] ; and from that time on, He was to 
be coming nearer and ever nearer, till His coming 
should consummate itself in the Day of His full and 
ultimate judicial manifestation in a glory of spiritual 



44 The Coming One. 

power and of celestial life, before which the earth 
and heavens should vanish as a dream. He seems to 
have held the chosen people, the Jews, as representa- 
tive of the human race, epitomizing the world's his- 
tory in their own ; so that the downfall of the 
Divinely-founded Hebrew institutions was type and 
earnest of the downfall of all human social and ma- 
terial structures, and of all things that could fall, in 
the Great Day when God should be fully revealed 
through His Son in fiery and final judgment. 

The approach of The Christ Who ever comes, will 
emerge to view in history through continuously re- 
curring crises, until in the crisis of crises history shall 
end. 



IX. 



CRISES AND EPOCHS OF THE FINAL COMING. 

Our vision, seeking the great End, ranges down a 
far-drawn vista of historic crises, among which Holy 
Scripture seems to light up into prominence, the fol- 
lowing — of which some are partially simultaneous — 
simultaneous at least to a degree which serves to 
group them all under two main Epochs, hereafter to 
be more fully considered. 

First Great Epoch.— The Millennial Coming 
of The Son Of Man. 

i . A Personal Coming of Christ to His waiting 
Church — the manifestation of His Presence, first, to 
His Church waiting in all the Heavens [Rev. xix. 6-14] ; 
then (transmissively perhaps through them) to His 
Church waiting in the Flesh ; then, still in the trans- 
mission of His spiritual forces, to the whole out-lying 
humanity on earth, and even to the infernal spheres, 

the Abyss [Rev. xix. 6— xx. 6 : Also, see Scriptural 

(45) 



46 The Coming One. 

references near the beginning of VII]. Even the 
natural world shares in the effects of this new Divine 
disclosure. This is not a manifestation of Christ in 
any form visible on earth to bodily eyes; but is His 
actual personal, therefore spiritual, coming, and re- 
vealed Presence, ministered to the Church, so far as 
the Church is in the Flesh, by The Holy Spirit 
Whose office it is to show Christ to men. This coming 
is cumulative from its era of beginning till its culmi- 
nation in the Judgment. Numerous Scriptures show 
that The Lord comes first to His people, gathers them 
into one, and brings them with Him in His final 
Coming [Zech. xiv. 5 : Col. iii. 3, 4; 1 Thess. ii. 19: 
iii. 13 : iv. 14: II Thess. ii. 1]. Of that final Coming, 
this is the last grand approach, as it is the last grand 
prefigurative type, or rather the actual beginning: 
and by such personal force from Christ exerted 
through His Church, vast moral and social move- 
ments must shake the world. 

2. A Millennium, or aeon (age) of blessing and vic- 
tory for the Church of God [Is. ii. 2, 3 : xi. 6-9 : Mic. 
iv. 1, 2: Hab. ii. 14: Heb. viii. 11 : Rev. xiv. 6: xx. 1-6]. 
This stands solely in the spiritual might of Christ's 
new disclosure of Himself, and is correspondent as an 
aeon or period in both the earthly and the heavenly 



Crises and Epochs. 47 

Church — its first development being necessarily in the 
vaster, mightier Church above. On earth the Gospel 
shall move swiftly to control all lands, under the out- 
pouring of The Holy Spirit. 

3. A Resurrection, through the power of the same 
coming (personal spiritual manifestation) of Christ 
Who is The Life : a true Resurrection or enduement 
with the perfected " spiritual body" [1 Cor. xv. 44: 
I Thess. iv. 14, 16: Phil. iii. 11], certainly of eminent 
departed saints, and conceivably of the departed 
saints in general [1 Cor. xv. 23], " every man in his 
own order" [rdyfia] ; and a presentation of them all 
as living with Christ. This is " the First Resurrec- 
tion" [Rev. xx. 4-6: Heb. xi. 35: Lk. xx. 35, 36: 
Phil. iii. 8-1 1, 14, 20, 21], involving a certain insti- 
tuting or enthroning of the risen ones with Him as 
leaders and governors of the whole humanity [Rev. 
xix. 6 — xx. 6]. It is quite inconceivable that the risen 
ones should be in any form visible to mere bodily 
eyes ; " flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom 
of God" [1 Cor. xv. 50], and the " spiritual body" 
cannot be seen by eyes that are only of the Flesh. 
This Resurrection though not without great effects 
on the earth, has for its scene the spiritual world 
which is far more profoundly real than this world of 



48 The Coming One. 

the visible, real as we know this to be. It is to be 
thought of as progressive resurrection, developing it- 
self outward from Christ as the Centre, through widen- 
ing circuits of spiritual being according as men are 
ready, or shall be made ready to meet Him with joy. 
It culminates in the General Resurrection at the end 
of the thousand years. 

4. The Great Apostasy ; the last short desperate 
rally of all the spiritual powers of evil, correspondent 
in both the earthly and the infernal spheres though 
originating in the latter; and a " falling away" from 
the holy to the evil company, of some who had ex- 
ternally submitted to Christ's Kingdom [Rev. xx. 
7-10: II Thess. ii. 2, 3, 6-8]. Great Divine disclo- 
sures in all time tend to rouse evil into greater an- 
tagonism : the Millennial coming of Christ thus calls 
forth the most terrible and the last. 

Last Great Epoch.— The Coming Of The Son 
Of Man In Final Judgment. 

5. The Final Coming of Christ — the ultimate Mani- 
festation of the Personal Son Of God from the 
Heavens, in an awful Glory of love, life and power, 
beneath which the hosts of the Apostasy sink as 
under lightning-stroke ; while by His Presence the 



Crises and Epochs. 49 

very elements of external Nature are dissolved [Heb. 
xii. 27: II Pet. iii. 7, 10-13 : Rev. x. 5-7], and matter 
vanishes instantly into that deeper spiritual reality of 
which it had been but the symbol and the agent; 
and all humanity on the earth, and in all infernal 
spheres, and in whatever celestial spheres, which has 
not as yet gathered unto Him, is drawn in before Him 
in Whom it lives and has its being, and presents itself 
in general Resurrection and perfect revelation under 
the absolute Light and Truth of Him Who even in 
the Flesh could say — " I am the Light :" "I am the 
Truth." This Final Coming is not, and cannot possi- 
bly be, in this visible material sphere : it is unto the 
material, which instantly fades and .passes from before 
it, fleeing " as a dream when one awaketh." The 
frame of Nature is too weak to be the stage of such 
stupendous action and movement. Therefore no 
bodily eyes shall see it : they that are in the Flesh 
shall be changed " in the twinkling of an eye." It is 
said above, and elsewhere in this treatise, that Mat- 
ter, at Christ's Final Coming, fades, passes, vanishes, 
is dissolved into its deepest spiritual reality. This 
fully accords. with Holy Scripture: but there may be 
difficulty in deciding whether the fact thus revealed 

is to be taken as the historical and actual end of the 
3 



50 The Coming One. 

matter itself of our world, or as the final instantane- 
ous transfer of the human race out of all relations to 
the present material sphere. If any minds find the 
latter most manageable by their thought, it may be 
taken as fully meeting the Scriptural statement ; as we 
speak of the world, as fading, vanishing from around 
the dying, while they are passing away from it* This 
possible alternative for our thought regarding the final 
disposition of matter, is to be noted at all those points 
in this treatise where it is not duly stated. As to mat- 
ter, since we know not yet what it is, how shall we 
say what is to become of it when man has outgrown 
it? 

6. The Final Judgment ; not any manner of trial, 
but instant judicial manifestation, discrimination of 
all men as by a moral polarization, according as their 
inmost life joins itself to, or revolts from, the Holy 
Son Of God [Mat. xxv. 31-46: Rom. xiv. n, 12: Acts 
xvii. 31 : II Pet. ii. 9 : Rev. xx. 12-15 ; II Cor. v. 10] : 
thus, the final, absolute, moral decision concerning 
every act of every man, as all the acts of each having 
ultimated in his character, shall then unveil them- 
selves instantly and utterly in his essential life opened 
to its inmost under that infinitely sea ching light of 
Christ ; which moral decision instantly registers and 



Crises and Epochs. 51 

executes itself [Jn. xii. 47, 48] — each soul flying irre- 
sistibly to that whether good or evil, and giving itself 
over to that, to which its supreme choice and love 
correspond [1 Cor. iv. 5]. 

7. Recompense ; the reaping of that which has been 
sown ; the gathering and continuance of all moral 
harvests under Divine law; the consummation of 
character under the judicial administration of God's 
own holiness, whereby godliness — the gift of God 
through faith — inevitably confirms itself into an in- 
ward heaven and configures heaven outwardly around 
itself and enters the actual Heaven ; and ungodliness 
inevitably tends from the first to confirm itself into 
an inward hell and to configure an outward hell 
around it, so creating and entering Hell [Rom. vi. 23 : 
Gal. vi. 7, 8]. 

Then, The End, ineffable, unsearchable [Rev. x. 
5-7] : end of times, utmost boundary of histories, 
limit of present revelation, close of predicted Divine 
comings to Man by The Son or The Spirit ; farthest 
verge of thought, since it marks the farthest reach of 
Mediatorship, as made known to us, between God 
and our humanity; merging and transfigurement of 
the blessed and Glorious Mediatorial Kingdom into 



52 The Coming One. 

that inconceivably grander Blessing and Glory, of 
which the Revealing Spirit testifies only this [i Cor. 
xv. 24-28] — 

"God shall be All In All." 



The Millennial Coming Of The Son Of Man. 



PART II. 

THE MILLENNIAL COMING OF THE SON OF MAN. 



IFTING up our eyes toward the vast future which 
r^ is veiled as well as unveiled in Prophecy, we have 
discerned, if we mistake not, two main epochs to 
which are assignable in two several groups all the 
events for which in Holy Scripture we are taught to 
look. 

These two epochs are two comings of The Lord, 
yet not two separate comings — at least not separate 
in their nature. The First, which we may call 
Christ's Millennial Coming, grows into the Last, which 
is His Final Coming in Judgment : the First is direct- 
ly transitional to the Last, and is preparative, as also 
prefigurative of it ; yet the Last carries the elements 
of the First onward and outward with an altogether 
transcendent power and scope. Still, we shall follow 

Holy Scripture if while we separate the two for con- 

(55) 



56 The Millennial Coming. 

venience of treatment, we remember that they are 
essentially One Coming. 

Taking the two in their order, we will discuss the 
First under a series of Questions ; thus gaining those 
glimpses of it in its many connections and bearings, 
which are all for which this little treatise makes any 
attempt. A due modesty on this broad and pro- 
found and difficult theme (and this especially as con- 
cerns the Resurrection), makes it proper to say again 
what was said in the preface, and what any reader 
may see — that our glimpses are at certain points 
glimpses through a hypothesis, whose validity must 
have its ultimate test in Holy Scripture. 



Questions On Christ's Millennial Coming. 



Questions First and Second. 59 

QUESTIONS ON CHRIST'S MILLENNIAL COMING. 

I. 

In the history of the Church of Christ and of the world, 
is there an epoch recognizably distinct, such as may be 
termed The Millennium? 

There is: it is abundantly revealed in Holy Scrip- 
ture, and it is the inevitable result of the Gospel. 
Is. ii. 2, 3: xi. 6-9: Mic. iv. 1, 2: Hab. ii. 14: Heb. 
viii. 11 : Rev. xiv. 6; xx. 1-6. 



II. 

Through how long a period does the Millennium con- 
tinue ? Rev. xx. 4-7. 

There are three theories. 

I . A prophetic thousand years— & day for a year — ■ 

thus 360,000 years. This is to be rejected ; as 

attaching to the simple round number, tooo, an 

arithmetically precise value of which it is nowhere 

else in the prophecies found to be the symbol; and 
3* 



Co The Millennial Coming. 

as giving the number this meaning with the result 
only of making it almost unmanageable by our 
thought. 

2. A literal historical thousand years. This is to 
be rejected, as interjecting a piece of bald literalism 
into a vast pictorial symbolism ; for symbolical cer- 
tainly are the Rider on the White Horse out of 
Whose mouth comes the sharp sword [xix. 11-16]; 
likewise the key of the Abyss, the chain, the seal, 
and the Dragon, the huge swinish serpent monster 
who is bound [xx. 1-3]. 

3. An ceonic thousand years— the 1000 symbolical, 
but in a general, not an arithmetical sense ; declarative 
of an entire seon of history, one of the great ages, long 
enough to develop its own special elements into 
their distinct natural and moral grandeur. Note : if 
this aeonic thousand shades in our thought naturally 
and without dogma toward the literal 1000, we need 
not refuse such help to our conceptions. Ps. xc. 4 : 
II Pet. iii. 8. 



Questions Third and Fourth. 6i 

III. 

Is that Manifestation of Christ predicted in Holy Scrip- 
ture as His Second Coming, before or after the Millen- 
nium ? 

Neither: The Millennium is simply the whole 
epoch of Christ's Great Coming ; that Coming in its 
beginning begins the Millennium, and its culmination 
in the Judgment ends the Millennium. Because and 
as Christ's continuous coming in all history devel- 
opes itself into its last stages, the distinct features of 
the Millennial epoch are developed. 



IV, 

In what manner or degree is the Millennium a distinct 
aeon or epoch ? 

1. It is recognizably distinct : it is an epoch. 

2. It is distinct not to the degree of disconnec- 
tion : it is truly historical, not thrown out of the 
natural order, as though the material were submerged 
in the spiritual. It is distinct, as each great epoch is, 
in the sense of being a transition from the period 



62 The Millennial Coming. 

preceding to the period subsequent. And as transi- 
tions, social and moral, are not noticed by the masses 
of men till they have revealed themselves at large in 
outward results, The Lord's Millennial Coming may 
not only, like His Coming in Judgment, find men 
unexpectant, but it may even have fully begun as a 
distinct operative force while men are yet asking — 
Where are the signs of His coming? 

3. It is distinct to a degree beyond the nearer pre- 
vious epochs, as being a grander transition, in the 
ripeness of the historic times, under the sway of 
heightened forces from The Son Of God, and but 
one seonic step from the consummation of all things. 



V. 

Is the Millennium a new Divine Dispensation as to princi- 
ples and procedure ; or is it a prolongation and the con- 
summation of the Dispensation of The Holy Spirit? 

It is none other than the Dispensation of The 
Blessed Spirit, The Dove, Sanctifier, Comforter, Who 
convinces of sin, Who renews into penitence and 
love through faith, Who shows the Living Christ 



Question Fifth. 63 

unto men. As a historic aeon differing not in nature, 
but in degree, from the preceding, it is the splendid 
consummation of the promised gift of The Holy 
Ghost — than Whose revelation of Christ we have 
absolutely no knowledge from Holy Scripture of any 
mightier, until Christ's utmost revelation ending Time 
itself. [Jn. xiv. 16, 26 : xvi. 7-15]. Speaking historic- 
ally and after the manner of men, we cannot say that 
the Millennium began with the descent of The Holy 
Ghost on the Day of Pentecost ; but in a deep 
spiritual sense this is true [Jn. vi. 62, 63] ; as the 
Apostles signify, when they speak of their days as 
" the last time/' of themselves as living " in the end 
of the world," of the Coming of The Lord as 
" nigh." These men, indifferent, as were the elder 
prophets often in their visions, to the march of mere 
planetary time, and instead deeply mindful of stages 
of moral and spiritual advance ; beholding that their 
age was that of God's last great gift to the world of 
His Son and Spirit, of which gift the future could be 
only a development — a gift whose very nature it was 
to introduce the general restitution and consumma- 
tion — these men felt that all the air of their time 
was full of the coming Christ. It is our fashion now 
to speak kindly of their mistake through a too eager 



64 The Millennial Coming. 

hope for the Day of The Lord ; we have much chari- 
ty for them : charity is good ; perhaps we may need 
it exercised toward us. It is a pity for us that we 
do not recognize the Christ coming. It may be that 
the Apostles knew as much of the Second Advent 
as we know ; at least what they knew, they knew in 
its spiritual bearings ; while we are apt to know 
things with a sharp, rattling wisdom, and measure 
God's seons smartly on the dials of our patent clocks. 
The Apostolic Church " themselves knew perfectly 
that the Day of The Lord so cometh as a thief in the 
night ; " they stood in grand affirmation of the fact. 
With them, Time was a mere incident. We are 
strong in negations of the items of their belief; our 
testimony to the fact is faint. Could we be disen- 
tangled from the temporal in our judgments, we 
might find ourselves joined with them in testimony 
to the spiritual, and sparing our pity. 



VI. 

Is the Millennium introduced, or does it proceed, by 
catastrophe, social, historical, material ? 

It so appears in Holy Scripture, though not to 



Questions Sixth and Seventh. 65 

the extent of any cosmical overthrow. It is the 
epoch of spiritual forces brought by The Son Of 
God in the beginning of the day of His Great Com- 
ing [Rev. xiv. 6, 7]. These cannot be brought to 
bear on the world through the mightier workings of 
The Holy Ghost, without profound and tremendous 
crisis (Greek, Kpimg, judgment), moral discriminations, 
stimulations and antagonisms of character in souls 
and communities ; whence vast upheavals, disintegra- 
tions and re-formations of society and institutions 
must result. These are eminently to be looked 
for as the Millennium opens. Christ comes to send 
fire on the earth : what will He if it be already kin- 
dled? [Lk. xii. 49]. But the Millennial crises shall 
be the blessed hastenings of man in a new faith and 
power, to meet the King. [Is. ii. 10-21 : xxv. 7, 8: 
xxvi. 21 : Lk. xxi. 25-28]. 



VII. 

Is the Millennium ended by catastrophe, and by what ? 

Most plainly, by the catastrophe of catastrophes, 
social, moral, spiritual, historical, cosmical, universal, 



66 The Millennial Coming. 

shaking and dissolving the earth and heavens, the 
consummation of all things in the awful glory of the 
utmost Coming of The Son Of Man. Not the earth 
alone, but the spiritual heavens also [Mat. xxiv. 30, 
31: Col. i. 20], so far as they have had association 
with this world of humanity, shall be searched and 
cleansed in the universal flame of His Presence, 
Whose mere Presence shall make, shall be, the very 
light and atmosphere of the Great Day, under which 
all things on earth and in the heavens that can be 
shaken, shall dissolve as with fervent heat. The 
Millennium is the mighty approach, above and below, 
of this growing consummation [Mat. xxiv. 27, 37-39: 
Lk. xvii. 26-30: 11 Pet. iii. 7, 10-12 : Rev. xxi. 1]. 



VIII. 

What is the binding of Satan in the Abyss during the 
Millennium? Rev. xx. 1-3, 7, 8. 

Satan : The archaic spirit of evil concerned in the 
fall of Man ; the Abaddon (Hebrew, Destruction) 
[Job xxvi. 6, etc.], the Apollyon [Greek, Destroyer) 
[Rev. ix. 1 1] who is the Angel of the Abyss ; the 



Question Eighth. 67 

Great Dragon [Rev. xii. 9] who with his angels was 
"cast out from heaven into the earth, that old ser- 
pent [Gen. iii. I, 2, 4, 13-15] called the Devil (Greek, 
&td3o/.cx; y Calumniator) and Satan {Greek, Adversary) 
who deceiveth the whole world ; " the Accuser {Greek, 
Kanjyuq) [see in Rev. xii. 10; also Job i. 9, 10] ; " the 
Prince of the Power of the Air, the Spirit that now 
worketh in the children of disobedience " [Eph. ii. 2]. 
Although the names given him in Holy Scripture 
may have in part a mythic origin, or may refer to 
that in him which was apparitional (as the Serpent in 
Eden), yet he appears plainly as a being real, active, 
cunning, mighty, the chief enemy of God and Man ; 
and, as it would seem, a celestial Angel fallen of old. 
His natural place is the Abyss ; there is the region 
which, as fitted to him, may be said to be his home; 
yet seeking mischief, he w r anders to and fro in the 
human moral and social world. Satan may here be 
taken as symbol of the whole Satanic crew of spirits. 
The Abyss {Greek, afivoooc, bottomless) : This term 
is used as possibly, but not necessarily, disconnected 
from the idea of guilt and misery, only once [Rom. 
x. 7] — " Who shall descend into the Abyss ? that is to 
bring Christ up again from the dead." In general its 
meaning seems vague and indeterminate — equivalent 



68 The Millennial Coming. 

not to the Hell of the Christian dogma, not to the 
Sheol or Hades or realm of the dead of both the Old 
and the New Testaments ; but designating in general 
that portion of the unseen world in which demons were 
supposed to have their proper habitation, thought of, 
perhaps, as a godless emptiness — an unfathomable 
" outer darkness," but to which they were not as yet 
finally banished, and of which the ever-kindling and 
increasing fires had not as yet flamed fully into the 
everlasting burnings. The term, drawn from the an- 
cient geocentric cosmogony, and implying a shadowy 
immensity of sin and misery, is evidently used 
throughout Holy Scripture in a meaning capable of 
being shaded upward toward Hades, the abode of the 
dead (viewed in this connection as the abode of only 
the wicked dead), but always naturally tending to 
shade downward into the final perdition. 

An angel descending out of the Heavens, having the 
Key of the Abyss [Rev. xx. i] : Not to be confounded 
with the star [Rev. ix. I, 2] under the Vth Trumpet, 
" fallen from the Heaven upon the Earth, to whom 
was given the Key of the pit (or mouth?) of the 
Abyss" {i. e. y he was permitted to open the Abyss), 
so that smoke ascended thence, out of which smoke 
came locusts upon the Earth. Angel here is doubt- 



Question Eighth. 69 

less a symbolical term, personifying to the seer the 
irresistible personal energy now put forth by Christ 
Himself Whose special prerogative it is that He pos- 
sesses the keys of Death and of Hades [Rev. i. 18], 
and of the Abyss [Lk. viii. 31]. The angel's descent 
out of the Heavens, taken with the picture in Rev. 
xix. II-2T, plainly marks the action in this whole 
Millennial scene as originating in the Heavenly sphere, 
and as propagated thence to the earthly-human sphere 
to which the Great Dragon had previously been cast ; 
and as reaching even to the pit (mouth ?) of the bot- 
tomless infernal realms. The " great chain " in the 
Angel's hand [Rev. xx. 1] symbolizes the natural and 
spiritual forces and processes of Divine restraint ; and 
together with his violently seizing the Dragon and 
binding him therewith, and the shutting him into the 
Abyss and sealing it over him for a thousand years 
[xx. 2, 3], implies an intensified and utterly inviola- 
ble confinement remote from the whole sphere in 
which humanity abides, and this for the space of one 
entire aeon in human history. It involves the removal 
from man of that whole demoniac temptation to sin 
with which from the beginning the infernal spheres 
have invaded and infested the region of man's life in 
the Flesh. 



?o The Millennial Coming. 



IX. 

What are the chief moral and social characteristics of the 
Millennium ? 

"That he [Satan] should deceive [seduce, mislead] 
the nations no more " [Rev. xx. 3] : this points, first, 
to a great cessation of public evils and crimes, to a 
cleansing of those reservoirs of moral .power which 
are found in laws, institutions, society itself. The 
restraint of all influent evil from the Abyss, leaves 
free course for the Gospel and for the mighty work- 
ing of The Holy Spirit, which will first gloriously 
illumine and empower the Church, and radiate thence 
with resistless light and force over all the world. 
Well may nations then be born in a day, and Christ 
reign from the River to the ends of the Earth. It is 
not revealed that the human nature will then cease 
to be a sinful nature, or that any man will then find 
salvation independently of redemption by The Son 
and regeneration through The Spirit Of God. A 
pure spiritual faith and love will not characterize 
every heart. But the Church, largely freed from 
worldly entanglements and no longer poisoned and 
enfeebled by infernal pride, will cast aside its old 



Question Ninth. 71 

hierarchism and ecclesiasticism, and therefore its sec- 
tarianism — one of the chief works of the Devil, and 
will gather joyfully into its one-ness in The Lord 
Jesus: whereby it shall rise to control the world's 
grandest forces ; inheriting the Earth not for the 
pomp and splendor of an externally organized King- 
dom (we must remember that nothing in Christ 
favors any externalism, any display in the outward 
machinery of government), but inheriting the earth 
through a surpassing meekness, which shall carry in 
itself the very presence of The Lord Jesus, and shall 
therefore be recognized as that Divine childlikeness 
which alone can bear rule as in His Name and admin- 
ister His Kingdom [Mat. xviii. 1-4]. In that day shall 
be fulfilled the prophecy, beautifully enfolded by our 
Lord in a beatitude [Mat. v. 5] — " The meek shall in- 
herit the Earth." The Millennium is waiting pa- 
tiently for Christ's Church to learn meekness. Soon 
as the Church, having learned, is ready to reign with 
Christ, it will reign over the world ; and no power can 
either give it kingship before this meekness and unity, 
nor prevail against it when, having gained these, it is 
seated with Christ on His throne. 



72 The Millennial Coming. 

X. 

What are the physical characteristics of the Millennium ? 

Death will not have ceased, nor physical evil have 
become unknown. The Millennium finds and con- 
ducts the world, in the same natural, material and 
historical sphere as the present. 

Yet, parallel with the ripening of the moral and 
spiritual nature of Man, and sympathetic with it, as 
the material must always of necessity follow and 
serve the development of the moral, there will be a 
ripened state of the whole system of outward Nature 
relative to Man ; whereby physical evil must be 
much reduced from its fierceness and its perversity. 

The whole epoch being transitional and verging 
toward the spiritual and the consummate, appears in 
Holy Scripture as characterized by Heavens more 
opened correspondent to the sealed Abyss ; thence 
as richer in spiritual forces, as in closer converse with 
the holy realms of Angels and of the departed Saints, 
and especially as marked by a consciousness in hu- 
man hearts of a more profoundly and mightily real 
Presence of The Son Of God. W.iile not clearly 
revealed, it yet seems indicated in the Word, that 



Questions Tenth and Eleventh. 73 

the primitive and natural visitation of celestial beings 
to our world, so often brought to view in the earlier 
history of the Old Testament, so long lost out of our 
experience and almost out of our possible belief by 
reason of that unnaturalness which is in sin, may be 
restored, not to the Church promiscuously, but to 
select Saints. We may expect its restoration so far 
as the Church on Earth shall have been lifted through 
its sufficient receiving of the inflow of The Holy 
Spirit to bring it into intimate and conscious com- 
munion with the Church in the Heavens. 



XL 

Is Christ's Millennial Coming and Reign, real and per- 
sonal — an actual efficiency on His part; or does it 
consist merely in an increase of faith, love and zeal on 
the part of His Church ? 

It is a real and personal manifestation of the real 
and Personal Christ as in a newly-developed nearness 
to His people and rulership over the world. No 
coming or kingdom can be conceived of more real or 
more directly personal than this shall be. Upon this 



74 The Millennial Coming. 

point light may be thrown from consideration of some 
subsequent questions. [See also Part I, V.] The in- 
crease of faith, love, power and zeal in Christ's 
Church is only the result of the increased degree in 
which He manifests His glorious Personality whose 
revelation to men is ahvays by The Holy Ghost, never 
profoundly or characteristically by the bodily senses 
[Jn. vi. 62, 63.] 



XII. 

In Christ's Millennial Coming and Reign, is He in a body 
of flesh and blood ? 

Is He in any such body (not flesh and blood, but " glori- 
fied ") as is visible to the bodily eyes of men? 

Not pushing our statement to its full allowable 
scope, we may say at the least, that it is impossible 
to substantiate the affirmative to either part of the 
above question. No man is in a position to affirm 
that the Glorified Body of The Christ will ever be 
seen by the eyes of any mortal body whatever. If it 
be said that " every eye shall see Him" in the Judg- 
ment-Day, it is not to be forgotten that no bodily 



Question Twelfth. 75 

eyes or mortal bodies will then be in existence to see 
Him. The consummate manifestation of The Son 
Of God in the full glory of The Father is itself the 
instant resolution of matter into its ultimate spiritual 
substance — at least its utmost dissolution from all 
connection with man. When the heavens and the 
earth melt as with fervent heat, and all the fabric of 
Nature dissolves away from before His face so that 
no place is found for it any more at all, the eyes that 
shall see Him cannot be the eyes of any such body 
as had lived on, and had been organized with, the 
vanished earth. 

The utmost which we can affirm as to Christ's visi- 
bility in the Millennium, whether in His coming or 
His reign, seems to be this: as in olden days some 
godly souls have, through faith under the special up- 
liftings of The Holy Ghost, been favored with visions 
(not dreams or phantasms, but actual spiritual seeing) 
of the personal Christ in His Glory [instance, the 
Apostle Paul, II Cor. xii. 1-4 : the Martyr Stephen, 
Acts vii. 55, 56], so in the latter days many men of 
faith may be qualified through the opening of their 
spiritual eye-sight by The Holy Spirit to a degree 
enabling them to see the King in His beauty. Yet 
this uplifted state can scarce'y be thought of as con- 



76 The Millennial Coming. 

tinuous and universal in the Church, but as vouch- 
safed at selected times, to certain elect souls when 
their experience rises into the full celestial harmony. 
But even should the whole Church stand, as is con- 
ceivable, in this opened spiritual vision, that fact would 
involve no material manifestation of Christ, or mani- 
festation to eyes of the Flesh. For though Christ 
Jesus is now glorified in a human body (He was not 
in His glorified body during the forty days before His 
Ascension), and whenever He is seen at all by men 
(and " every eye shall see Him ") will be seen in that 
real body of His Humanity, still His Glorified Body 
is not an animal human body, an organism of flesh 
and blood ; it is not revealed as in any form of matter 
of which we can now conceive ; but it is that primal, 
real, essential human body w r hich the Apostle Paul 
calls the " spiritual body." And a " spiritual body " 
is in its nature invisible to mere fleshly eyes : it can 
be seen only by the soul's eyes, and never even by 
these (if the soul be ensphered in matter) except as 
the soul is spiritually quickened and endued. Nor 
does this lack of materiality (in the sense of invisi- 
bility to bodily eyes) in the least invalidate the great 
elements of reality and personality in Christ's Pres- 
ence and Reign. Nothing is more real, nothing de- 



Question Twelfth. yj 

velops itself in a realm of more perfected Personality, 
than the Kingdom of God ; yet " flesh and blood," says 
St. Paul, " cannot inherit " that Kingdom, of which 
also our Lord says — It " cometh not with observation." 

Objection. — " But Christ can animate a body of 
flesh and blood if need be ; He can take to Himself an 
animal body as when on earth before, so making Him- 
self visible to all eyes!' 

Answer. — Undoubtedly He can ; but it is not now 
a question what Christ can do ; the only question is 
what does Holy Scripture give us reason to expect 
that He will do. And there is no revelation that 
there is to be any second Incarnation of The Son Of 
God. He has had His Resurrection, which issued 
after forty days, into Glorification : resurrections do 
not go backward. Nothing in Holy Scripture even 
intimates anything of the nature of a re-incarnation, 
a re-investiture in flesh and blood. No analogy in 
all that we know of Him favors the theory of any 
such retrocession in the glorious pathway of The Son 
Of God. Therefore while not presuming to limit the 
possibilities which may attach to Christ's Millennial 
Coming, we may return to our first statement, that it 
cannot be affirmed that that coming and presence will 
be in any form that is visible to fleshly eyes. 



78 - The Millennial Coming. 

Yet, on the other hand we must deal honestly with 
the clear utterances of the New Testament : we have 
no right to evaporate away Christ's Personality in His 
Coming, changing it into a mere moral influence upon 
the world, and a mere idea of Him entertained by men. 
We must rid ourselves of the notion that nothing is 
real which is not material as we know matter. We 
must remember that our Savior was indeed " put to 
death in the flesh/' but that He was " quickened 
[raised to life] in the spirit" and that His Body as a 
spiritual organism presents in that fact of spirituality 
a far higher and deeper realness than if it were flesh 
and blood [i Pet. iii. 18, 22]. On this point some 
light may come to us with a subsequent Question. 



XIII. 

Is the Millennium an epoch in the Church in the Heavens 
as well as to the Church on Earth ; and if so, what are 
the bearings of that fact? Which is the sphere of its 
original and chief development ? [Rev. xix. xx.] 

The Millennium has a heavenly as well as an 
earthly scene : it is correspondent in both spheres ; 
and this correspondence is one of its fundamental 



Question Thirteenth. 79 

elements. The epoch originates, and has its mighti- 
est development, in the Church in the Heavens. 

There is but one Church of Christ on the Earth 
and in all Heavens. Any mighty crisis in either 
sphere must necessarily re-act upon the other. Also 
the higher sphere of the .Church must necessarily 
take the lead in originating the grises of blessing and 
victory. The departed saints are never for one mo- 
ment out of the Church, or dissociated from its com- 
munion. Such a true spiritual communion must 
involve the two spheres in mutual action and re- 
action, by inevitable natural laws of our common 
humanity. Of this reciprocal action, it is natural 
that the Church in the fleshly sphere should to a 
great degree be unaware — following therein almost 
unconsciously — their eyes holden by the Flesh; 
while the Church on high may well be conceived of 
as far more consciously and mightily moved therein, 
and as taking the initiative under Christ's more direct 
leadership. 

In the Heavens to which the departed saints have 
been received, they are in much nearer relation to The 
Lord Jesus than are those remaining on the Earth ; 
and this, whether as concerns any of them who may 
be thought of as detained in any heavenly sphere 



80 The Millennial Coming. 

nearest in its nature to this of the Flesh, or as con- 
cerns any of them who may have received such gifts 
of The Holy Spirit that they have had ministered 
unto them "an abundant entrance" into the Heaven- 
ly Kingdom, and have already passed on into the 
higher Heavens and into an unspeakable nearness to 
Christ. Doubtless the lowest ranks of the saints in 
glory have a vision of Christ which to us is incon- 
ceivable. 

Now, any coming of Christ, any refreshing, revivi- 
fying presentation that He may make of His Glori- 
ous Personality to His saints, will necessarily com- 
municate itself first to those saints who are with 
Him in Glory. To them that have, shall be given. 
Those already most filled with His Infinite Fulness, 
and most in unity with Him, will be the most open, 
and the first open, for still larger gifts. Thence the 
mighty wave of such new developing glory of The 
Son Of God, rolling and descending through the vast 
gradations of the Heavens, will involve rank after 
rank of the glorified Church : the new disclosure of 
the Infinite Christ will be recognized as a new com- 
ing of The Son Of Man to spiritual sphere after 
sphere : the highest Heavens shall seem to be de- 
scending to flood with hitherto unimagined light all 



Question Thirteenth. 8i 

the lower celestial boundaries: Christ's whole Heav- 
enly Church must needs be stirred into intenser and 
more joyful life in His more manifested Presence. 
At last, this quickening must overflow (since the 
Church on Earth and in all Heavens is one) — must 
overflow with its spiritual stimulus, and along the 
lines of Christian sympathy must transmit the same 
stupendous impulse from the very Personality of 
Christ, to His Church waiting in the Flesh. 

Thus, the Millennium must begin with Christ, and 
it must begin in the Heavens : its first and chief 
developments of all manner of force and result must 
be there : thence it must project itself as the epoch 
of a great and real advent of Christ into the whole 
Church below ; thence further, since the Church 
holds Christ in stewardship for a lost World, it must 
project itself through the Church to the whole out- 
lying humanity, as a savor either of life unto life, or 
of death unto death : thence even further, it may be 
(we know not; but it may be) this great wave of 
Christ's all-conquering power is to reach the painful 
regions of the un-Christlike departed, carrying a 
strange excitement thither — a premonitory tremor of 
the final Judment Day — as they shall behold Satan, 

Prince of all ungodly Powers, the Angel of the 
4* 



82 The Millennial Coming. 

Abyss, withering from before this new Presentation 
of Christ's Glory, as though seized by a great Angel 
from on high and cast like lightning into the Abyss, 
and shut and sealed therein. 

On the importance of a view of the Millennium 
which shall present it as originating and centering in 
the Heavens, much might be said. Any other view 
seems narrow, flat, provincial. We think of our little 
earthly Church as though it were central and com- 
manding in the Universe. We are mighty, but only 
as we are an organic part of a far vaster and more 
splendidly equipped army. For the immense major- 
ity of our force is on high : we are a mere detach- 
ment here holding the outmost passes. What august 
and powerful and innumerable hosts are gathered 
there, and continually gathering! What shields of 
the mighty hang in the halls of the upper Zion ! 
Jerusalem which is above is the mother of us all. 
We keep no census of the saints below or above : 
but we know well, when we think of all the centuries 
past which have contributed to the Heavens their 
unnumbered multitudes — when we think of the 
myriads of little ones of whom Christ has said, 
"Suffer them to come unto Me on high," and whom 
He then has taken up thither as in His arms — that 



Question Thirteenth. 83 

when The Lord comes to His Church, it will be 
eminently a coming to His Great Church which joy- 
fully awaits His final manifestation through the 
Heavens, as we hopefully await it here. 

The world has some time since broadened its ideas 
sufficiently to discard in physical science the old 
geocentric cosmogony which set this planet at the 
centre of the Universe. Why should the Church 
cling to the geocentric theory of Christ's Spiritual 
Kingdom ? It is privilege enough for us that we are 
an integral part of the blessed Commonwealth, and 
that with consentaneous action we respond to the 
same Divinely personal force by which it is swayed, 
and keeping tune with the echo of its song, march 
with it to victory. This world is not the " own 
country " of Christ's Church : we are pilgrims here ; 
we seek another country, even a heavenly. 



84 The Millennial Coming. 

XIV. 

THE FIRST RESURRECTION. 

i. Is the Millennium introduced or accompanied by a 
Resurrection known as " the First Resurrection ? " 

2. Is the First Resurrection a true resurrection of per- 
sonal men, or a mere re-establishment on earth of 
neglected moral principles and spiritual forces ? 

3. What is the scene of the First Resurrection, and who 
have part in it ? 

4. Do all who have part in the First Resurrection rise in- 
stantaneously and simultaneously, and are they on the 
earth through that epoch in material bodies, or in any 
bodies visible to fleshly eyes ? 

5. Is there a real and personal reign or governance on the 
earth exercised with Christ by these risen ones? [Rev. 
xix. 1, 11-16: xx. 4-6]. 

These five divisions of the Question are interlacing, 
and must be answered in common. In general and 
for preliminary, we may answer sections I and 5, 
affirmatively : we may affirm the first alternative in 
section 2 : we may answer section 4, negatively ; 
while reserving section 3 for an answer balanced with 
various considerations. 

The Millennium opens with a resurrection : called 
the First Resurrection, a whole aeon in advance of 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 85 

the final Resurrection ; and this is properly a resur- 
rection — not on the one hand a mere rising again 
from long quiescence or neglect, of certain moral 
principles, forces, or abstract elements of character — ■ 
not on the other hand a re-incarnation of souls in 
bodies of flesh and blood or in any bodies that are 
visible to mere material eye-sight. It is a resurrec- 
tion in the sense that it concerns personal beings, to- 
wit a certain number (and conceivably, all) of the de- 
parted servants of Christ ; and in the sense that it in- 
volves a manifestation of these persons in their pro- 
found and ultimate fellowship with The Lord Jesus, 
and therefore as endued through Him Who is The 
Resurrection and The Life, with their true and 
proper spiritual bodies fashioned in the image of the 
body of His Glory. 

To know what is this resurrection, we must con- 
sider what is resurrection in general — the Resurrec- 
tion which Holy Scripture represents as wrought 
through Christ Jesus upon the whole humanity? 

It is not a mere re-animation — the speedy return 
of the departed spirit into the unchanged body, as in 
the case of Lazarus. That is indeed a resurrection, 
but wrought in the lowest and most outward sphere 



86 The Millennial Coming. 

of human life — the bodily sphere ; and only as the 
visible symbol and evidence and occasional overflow 
of that deeper resurrection life which proceeds from 
Christ. As such evidence, the historical bodily resur- 
rections are important, and that of Christ is indis- 
pensable ; but, not as developing the full meaning of 
the resurrection-life [Jn. xx. 17]. 

It is not any re-incarnation — the re-investiture in 
flesh and blood of the spirit long gone thence (the 
new body being supposed to have some organic 
identity with the old whose substance and form have 
vanished in decay). That would be a resurrection ; 
but, like the preceding, operative on only the lowest 
plane. This fact indeed does not prove it inadmissi- 
ble. But it is not revealed that one such case ot 
resurrection (after utter decay of the body) has ever 
occurred : and we know that the great future Resur- 
rection is to be not in any such fashion : " flesh and 
blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God : " not the 
" natural [material] body/' but the " spiritual body " 
[1 Cor. xv. 44, 49, 50] is the body of immortality. 

It cannot be affirmed to be a re-investiture in a body 
of any conceivable kind of matter (not flesh and 
blood, but " etherealized " or " spiritualized n or " ex- 
quisitely refined " matter). While we cannot so posi- 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 87 

tively deny this supposition as the previous one, be- 
cause it instantly takes us into a realm of utter igno- 
rance, we may boldly say that no man is in a position 
to affirm it ; because to affirm it is to invent a kind of 
matter which seems to be not matter and which has 
never been discovered, but only imagined to exist as 
matter ; and because to affirm it is to countervail the 
general drift of the Apostle Paul's teachings [1 Cor. 
xv.] which is strongly away from all the material and 
toward the spiritual. If in some Scriptures the Resur- 
rection seems to be revealed as in a material sphere, 
we are to remember that Divine truths are always 
revealed to men as men are able to receive and bear 
them [Jn. xvi. 12] ; and that it is the usage of the 
Bible to present the purely spiritual facts either in 
their material relations or through their fitting ma- 
terial emblems. Undoubtedly it is much nearer the 
truth to believe in a resurrection of the material 
body, than to disbelieve in the Resurrection ; and we 
must not deny that God has power to work such a ma- 
terial resurrection ; though we find the great Resur- 
rection as revealed, something far higher. 

It is not a return to life of persons whose life had 
become extinct. If the life of any person ever became 
extinct, or ever will or can become extinct, it is not 



88 The Millennial Coming. 

revealed to us. What we know as death is not per- 
sonal life extinguished, but personal life transferred 
into new relations. Thus Christ refers to the dead 
Patriarchs, as not dead, but living [Lk. xx. 37, 38]. 

Is it a mere awakening to consciousness of those who 
have been as in slumber of all the faculties ? No. It 
may in part be an awakening to full consciousness 
(especially moral consciousness) : but we cannot 
affirm as even possible, the complete slumber of all 
the faculties ; wherefore we cannot affirm, nor is it 
revealed, that resurrection by Christ is a mere return 
to natural consciousness. 

What then is the Resurrection ? It is a mystery. 
We must be content to confess it so. It is not neces- 
sary for our present purpose to say much more than 
to indicate the above things which it is not, by guard- 
ing our thought against which we may clear our 
vision for glimpses of the Millennial resurrection. 

So far as the Resurrection for the future life is re- 
vealed to us, it is certainly something wrought by 
Christ's power alone ; and it appears as that ultimate 
consummation in fact, and that full manifestation to 
the consciousness of the man himself and to the cogni- 
zance of others, of his inmost moral and personal being, 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 89 

with its plenary equipment for activity in the spiritual 
world — which consummation and manifestation are 
wrought only under Christ's complete manifestation of 
Himself to the man and throughout the sphere in 
which the man abides. For He saith— " I am The 
Resurrection and The Life." It involves the per- 
fect investiture of the man with whatever organism 
(" spiritual body ") may be fit to his personality, and 
may serve him for conveyance, expression, or action, 
in the mighty sphere of spiritual and immortal be- 
ing. Thus, the General Resurrection-Day must be, 
as it appears in Holy Scripture, the General Judg- 
ment-Day. 

Now those who are so perfectly and actively joined 
to Christ, that they live in a blessed consciousness of 
His Presence, may be conceived of as close to the 
Resurrection-state; as therefore earlier in awaking to 
their consummate life in Him, in the Morning of the 
Resurrection when He begins His Millennial Mani- 
festation to His Church above and below. These 
therefore have their blessed rising in the Heavenly 
sphere, in the First Resurrection, a whole aeon in ad- 
vance of the mass of humanity; for even while on 
the earth they may have so received Son-ship and life 
that they had almost broken the bonds of death. 



go The Millennial Coming. 

When Christ comes to the world in final judgment, 
these come with Him — u the myriads of His saints" 
[i Thess. iv. 14: Jude, 14, 15]. Hence we are to think 
of the Resurrection-life as beginning in its essential 
and vital principle, in the New Birth of the soul by 
the power of The Holy Ghost ; which also seems fully 
intimated in Holy Scripture [Jn. xi. 25 : Rom. viii. 
1-23 : Gal. vi. 8 : Eph. ii. 6 : Col. iii. 1-4 : 1 Jn. iii. 2]. 

"They lived and reigned with Christ a thousand 
years. The rest of the dead lived not till the thou- 
sand years should be finished. This is the First 
Resurrection " {From the Greek, Rev. xx. 4, 5]. This 
shows " the dead " in two classes : the first class, " the 
dead" that " lived;" the second class, "the dead" 
that " lived not " then. Thus it is evident that 
"dead" is here a term of mere appearance, indica- 
ting only a death that is phenomenal as viewed by 
men's outward eyes, not a real death or cessation of 
being, not necessarily any cessation of consciousness, 
Equally is it evident that " lived " does not here mean 
merely existed, continued to exist, began to exist, 
returned to existence, or even returned to conscious- 
ness : the word is " lived," not rose again, or were 
raised ; but " lived!'' " The dead " therefore are sim- 
ply those whom the world, always superficial, com- 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 91 

monly thought of as not living, because they had 
ceased to animate a body of flesh and blood : " the 
dead " that "lived," were those whom the seer saw 
alive in the Heavenly sphere, first moving in magnifi- 
cent procession with Christ [xix. 1, 6-9, 11-14], then 
[xx. 4-6] throned and regnant with Him : thus, those 
equally " dead," so far as the word of this vision 
characterizes them, who " lived not till the thousand 
years should be finished," w r ere those who had no 
part or place in this scene of life and action which 
now gathers and centres around Him Whose " Name 
is called The Word Of God." Not till the end of the 
Millennial age do these " live " in this sense of gather- 
ing themselves together as personal lives in a life- 
scene of which He Who alone is The Life is the cen- 
tre : and then, for a little season, they also " live " in 
this sense — being swept in before Him on the resist- 
less current of His all-commanding Life, gathered 
from every nearer and lower sphere of the Abyss, 
and from every darkness and shadow of death in 
which they may have hidden, and from whatever re- 
motest infernal bounds to which any of them may 
have sunk, and standing alive in His Presence Who 
executeth judgment because He is The Son Of 
Man. 



92 The Millennial Coming. 

It is of some moment to notice that St. John here 
records no act of resurrection, u e., no act of rising 
from tombs or graves or from the sea, no enduement 
with bodies spiritual or otherwise, no trumpet of the 
archangel ; by all which points of omission this scene 
is differenced from the usual Scriptural symbolic 
scenes of the Resurrection of the Dead. Those emi- 
nent saints, martyrs, confessors, whom he is to see 
enthroned with Christ, he sees first in the Heavens 
already following Christ : he does not see them 
raised or rising. This would seem as though these 
had already been raised into the spiritual body, hav- 
ing (it is not affirmed, but possible) previously " at- 
tained unto the resurrection from the Dead " [Lk: 
xx. 35 : Phil. iii. 1 1]. It is no burden on our Christian 
thought, no strain upon any utterance of the Word 
of God, to conceive that every human being sinks or 
rises in the spiritual spheres exactly as far and exactly 
as soon and as fast as he is inwardly fitted to do by 
virtue of his profound individual relationship to The 
Son Of God. If he be made ready for the resurrec- 
tion, he will have resurrection, and as soon as he is 
made ready. If he be as yet unready, but have a 
seed of faith, the implantation of The Holy Spirit, 
his development may be hindered by infirmity, or 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 93 

may be hastened by special grace of God ; but until 
he is developed and ripened in the deep moral and 
spiritual essence of his being into the Resurrection- 
Life, he will not, he can not carry that life except as a 
life partial and expectant. Nothing in God's deal- 
ings is arbitrary, nothing unnatural : in especial the 
heavenly estate is to be thought of as the state of all 
normal natural processes. The Resurrection, the Com- 
ing and manifestation of The Son Of Man, the binding 
of Satan, the General Judgment, all are harvests of 
that which is profoundly, internally, spiritually ripe. 

To the question then, Who are these enthroned 
ones? or to the wider question — Who are the subjects 
of the First Resurrection? — we may answer thus. It 
is not directly revealed, but seems a legitimate con- 
jecture, that, in general, the departed who belong to 
Christ will have part in this Resurrection : at least 
we may say that all of them from the beginning who 
through The Holy Spirit shall have been made ready 
then to meet Him without spot in the company ot 
His Saints, shall be of the number. 

Of the sharers in the First Resurrection, we may 
distinguish (but only by intimations in the Word of 
God) five classes. 



94 The Millennial Coming. 

i. Some may have received such measures of grace 
from The Holy Ghost even while they tabernacled in 
the Flesh, as to have had Christ perfectly formed 
within them, and therefore to have had need to wait 
for the Resurrection Life no longer than till death 
had freed them from the infirmities of the body: 
these may have passed through death as through a 
mere door, instantly entering — with the " entrance 
ministered abundantly" [II Pet. i. n], through their 
instant vision of Christ and perfect union with Him, 
into the enduement of the Resurrection Life. To 
this number may we not assign the Apostle Paul? 
who seems to have been hopeful that he was not to 
be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might 
be swallowed up of life [II Cor. v. 1-8] ; who speaks 
also of his intense desire " by any means " to " attain 
unto the resurrection from the dead" [Phil. iii. n], 
not of the dead, for all the dead must come to that 
without effort to " attain unto" it; but "from" (eic, 
out of — in all the best Greek MSS. though not appear- 
ing in our version) ; who also expresses confidence that 
if he depart it will be "to be with Christ" [Phil. i. 
21, 23]. It is to be remembered that "to be with 
Christ," and to "see Him," implies in all Apostolic 
usage, the Resurrection Life: "when Christ Who is 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 95 

our life shall appear [be manifested], then shall ye 
also appear [be manifested] with Him in glory " [Col. 
iii. 4] : " We know that when He shall appear [be 
manifested], we shall be like Him ; for we shall see 
Him as He is" [1 Jn. iii. 2]. Also, we may remember 
Christ's word [Lk. xx. 35] when He speaks of those 
" that shall be counted worthy to obtain that world 
[Greek, ceon\ and the resurrection from the dead " 
(not of the dead, but ex, "from"). To the same class 
with the Apostle Paul we may perhaps assign Moses 
who appeared in a spiritual body of glory, therefore 
already in a Resurrection Life, on the Mount of 
Transfiguration in converse with The Lord Jesus. 

2. Others — for instance, Enoch and Elijah — may 
have attained the Resurrection Life, even without the 
mediation or transition of death ; so that, by immedi- 
ate translation out of their mortality, which being 
from Adam is a body of death, they rose into their 
spiritual bodies, in which one of them, Elijah, ap- 
peared with Christ in transfiguration. 

3. Still others — eminent Saints of the Old Dispen- 
sation — may, with no long delay in Hades under the 
power of death, have had their resurrection — " every 
man in his own rank " and at his due time. 

4. Still others — possibly much the largest number 



g6 The Millennial Coming. 

of the godly from under the Old Dispensation — may- 
have had their resurrection at the period of the Cru- 
cifixion, through Him Who declared Himself The 
Resurrection and The Life, and Who, dying, genu- 
inely dying as a man, went where dead men went (of 
old it was called Hades or Sheol) and there gathering 
to Himself the whole remaining company of those 
who had prevalently in their characters belonged to 
God, but who through various infirmities seem to 
have been held in some sort under the power of 
Death, drew them after Him, a glad newly-awakened 
company, and breaking through the barriers of the 
dark constraint ancient as man's sin, " led captivity 
captive," and brought them to glory and victory on 
high [Eph. iv. 8-10] : to this number we may perhaps 
— though there is much room for doubt-— assign those 
(not few) who evidently had a resurrection, some 
kind of resurrection, in some companionship with 
that of The Lord Jesus, concerning which we read 
that " many bodies of the saints which slept arose, 
and came out of the graves after His Resurrection, 
and went into the Holy City, and appeared unto 
many : " these seem to have been saints but recent- 
ly departed — perhaps of the number of Christ's fol- 
lowers — since they were recognized 'in Jerusalem [Mat* 
xxvii. Si-53]- 



XIV. The First Resurrection. 97 

5. Still others — and these dying since Christ 's death 
— may have been detained from that full vision of 
Him which is granted only to a perfect faith, and 
though happy in a far clearer vision of The Son Of 
God than they had known while in the Flesh, may 
have failed to awake fully into the new life : these, 
probably an immense majority of believers from all 
lands under the preaching of the Gospel through the 
eighteen centuries (eighteen, and will there be any 
more?), dwellers in some lower heaven, still somewhat 
bound and entangled with the old sphere of their 
mortality — these, far more " conscious " than when on 
earth — shall be awakened to full consummation and 
consciousness in the whole region of their higher spir- 
itual nature under the stimulant light of the Millen- 
nial Coming of The Son Of Man. Christ, revealed 
from the highest Heavens of His Glory shall flood 
with the brightness of His approach all the spiritual 
spheres. He knows His Sheep ; they will know Him, 
and arise to follow Him : seeing Him at last as He is, 
they too at last shall have their resurrection. And all 
this, viewed as one concrete fact, long-progressive and 
at last accomplished and made known at the epoch of 
Christ's new Millennial Manifestation, and by the 
power of that Manifestation — is the First Resurrection. 



98 The Millennial Coming. 

For aught that we know, the First Resurrection 
may be both cumulative in its power, and progressive 
as to the number of persons who share in it, from 
the instant of its first grand manifestation in the 
Heavens, through the whole Millennial seon, till the 
final hour when in the fullness of Christ's revealed 
Life, Death itself shall be destroyed and Resurrection 
be general and consummate. 

The First Resurrection then, so far from being a 
re-incarnation, a re-animation of bodies of flesh and 
blood, is even an antithesis to that ; it is the final 
putting off of the mortal and the putting on of im- 
mortality. Therefore, its main and proper sphere 
cannot be this of the material and the mortal. Its 
chief scene is not on the earth. Yet its results on 
the earthly scene must be immediate and mighty. 
It is the last approach of the Heavenly Powers with 
Christ at their head, before the final consummation. 
It brings indeed the beginning of that consumma- 
tion : it is the drawing nigh of Christ with ten thou- 
sands of His saints : it is directly mediative and 
transitional to the Judgment. On the earth, the 
First Resurrection will manifest its efficiency as the 
glory of the Latter Day, under the vitalizing revela- 
tion of Christ. 



General Survey of Christ's Millennial Coming. 



GENERAL SURVEY OF CHRIST'S MILLENNIAL COMING. 

The fore-going Questions on the Millennial Coming 
of The Son Of Man, may now be framed in a General 
Review, and, as it were, fringed with a General Sur- 
vey of the historic scene in which the complex 
action is laid. 

The human race now exists, as to a small part of 
it, in this material sphere, which, for that part, cir- 
cumscribes all its spiritual developments, while it 
frames its needful probation. As to the other and 
immensely larger portion of it, it may be thought of 
as existing in various lower spheres of a spiritual 
world, which spheres, as Scripture reveals, are not as 
yet fully disconnected with this of our mortality. 
" Spheres : " it is not revealed to us that the spiritual 
world is arranged in literal spheres ; so while we may 
allow ourselves the help which such a conception 
may give, we must refrain from affirming it as a fact. 
We may use the word as equivalent to the unknown 
regions, organized in gradations correspondent to the 

(IOI) 



102 The Millennial Coming. 

different grades of being whose abodes they are. [I 
Cor. xv. 41, 42 : II Cor. xii. 2]. A moment's compu- 
tation will bring us to the conjecture that beside our 
fifteen-hundred millions here, there cannot be less than 
fifty-thousand millions of men now living somewhere 
in the spiritual world. The sphere of the completely 
spiritual which is the ultimate and immortal sphere 
for man, supervenes not until the consummating 
judgment of Christ's Great Day. To this consum- 
mation all earthly things, character, organisms, forces, 
all the spheres also that are abodes of human souls, 
even the very cosmos, grow from the beginning. 
Everything ripens: each character, fact and force is 
garnered at its proper harvest time. 

Yet as all material things exist merely as the tran- 
sient vehicle for the spiritual, they are by natural law 
subordinate in growth and ripening to the spiritual. 
The material furnishes the spiritual with form indeed, 
but it is not an arbitrary form ; the spiritual by a law 
of its own development configures to itself the exter- 
nal ; and matter and all its frame can ripen no faster 
than the soul. " For the earnest expectation of the 
creature [creation] waiteth for the manifestation of 
the sons of God — For we know that the whole crea- 
tion groaneth and travaileth in pain together until 



General Survey. 103 

now — waiting for the adoption, the redemption of 
our body " [Rom. viii. 19, 22, 23]. 

The Coming of The Son Of Man begins when Man 
begins, u e. } it begins as a germ its ever-developing 
process. The Judgment by The Son Of Man also 
begins in its essence, when Man begins. All human 
history is the unveiling, the coming, and the judging, 
of Him " Who is and Who was and Who is to come, 
The Almighty.'' Thus, Crises (in the Greek sense, 
judgments) are continuously recurrent. They make, 
they are, history. They move in cycles vast and 
countless, tending always to inner and .still interior 
lines of elimination and moral separation. Their 
cycles repeat themselves ; but if narrowly watched, 
are seen to be continually drawing into their issues, 
new and higher elements, and touching points of finer, 
more recondite, therefore more stupendous moral 
moment. Hence from the beginning, the great his- 
toric crises, depending on the ever recurring advents 
of The Eternal Son Of God, move in lines which 
may be roughly said to whirl upward, through ever 
widening ranges, till the last great cycle attendant 
on the last and grandest coming, the consummate 
Coming of The Christ in Judgment, shall involve the 



104 The Millennial Coming. 

whole Humanity, in its deepest character, in its com- 
pleted history, in its every deed and thought, as also 
in all its abodes whether in the flesh or in the 
heavenly and the infernal spheres. When the last 
Great Day has fully come, it will be because the 
Christ always steadily coming shall have at last so 
fully come, that His Presence shall have become as 
the very light and atmosphere of all the immeasurable 
regions in which Humanity may then exist. Where- 
fore, in that- last crisis or judgment, the heavens and 
the earth must flee away from before His face, and 
no place be found for them. 

Meanwhile there are transitions, ages of delay " as 
men count slackness/' but ages in which are being 
prepared the great historic bursts of visible results 
which mark and divide the changing seons. The faith- 
ful are not in darkness that such days overtake them 
as a thief: they are waiting and watching; they have 
seen the sign of The Son Of Man in the Heavens. 
The worldly and unwatchful are always overtaken 
and overwhelmed : so in the days of Noah, in the 
day of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the destruction of 
Jerusalem, and in the last Great Day [Mat. xxiv. 27, 
37-39, 42, 44, 50: Lk. xvii. 28-30]. 



General Survey. 105 

Inasmuch as the Lord's comings grow morally 
mightier and nearer to the centre of man's being and 
history, as they draw on toward the consummation 
of the ages, they may naturally introduce an aeon of 
transition between the material and the ultimately 
spiritual. We may conceive of that as the Millennial 
era, in which Christ shall have brought His Race to 
the threshold of the Eternal. Then vaster powers of 
evil and of good are stirred into activity. There is 
higher moral pressure, intenser development : all the 
Heavens bend more closely down to kiss and embosom 
man, brother of the angels, younger brother indeed 
of The Son Of God : Hell heaves and crawls from be- 
neath with demoniac energy. A great " falling away " 
prefiguring the last and greatest Apostasy, some wide 
and severe tribulation, seems to be predicted for the 
opening of the Millennium. 

But Christ has come forth upon the field not to be 
defeated. He is the conquering Savior. Behold ! a 
mighty Advent of Him Who is called Faithful and 
True, and Whose Name is The Word Of God, and 
from Whose mouth issues the sharp sword piercing 
to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit [Rev. xix. 
11-16: xx. 1-4]. The great Dragon is bound and 
shut in the Abyss, to seduce the nations no more for 

s* 



106 The Millennial Coming. 

a thousand blessed years. All the infernal spheres 
are sealed ; no more effluent evil from the Abyss : all 
the heavenly spheres long shut, begin to be opened ; 
they rain down righteousness : salvation like the dew 
distills from them upon the earth through the influent 
Spirit Of God. 

As the Apostle John saw the " holy and blessed " 
company of " the first resurrection " in the Heavens 
before he saw it on the Earth, so if we mistake not, he 
saw Christ's Advent to introduce the Millennium, and 
he saw the Millennium itself as an aeon, begun in the 
spiritual spheres before it was developed on the Earth 
[Rev. xix. xx]. Indeed he says nothing definitely of 
its bodily and visible, but only of its personal, spiritu- 
al, moral, social, development in this mortal sphere. 
He sees thrones, and Christ and His glorious escort 
exalted on them as Princes : he does not say that 
these thrones or these persons were on the material 
earth, or on the earth in any sense. The authority 
from them was indeed exercised upon the earth, 
through whose whole aspect their governance effected 
results of mighty change ; but we know that the Em- 
press of the Indies from her island-throne fast-an- 
chored in the stormy German Ocean, governs 200,- 
000,000 of subjects who never saw her face or the 



General Survey. 107 

land of her abode. Indeed as to the enthronement 
of the risen saints, it is written [Rev. xx. 4] that they 
shall be throned with their Lord ; therefore we are 
not compelled in our thought to see them Mayors, 
Governors, Chief Justices, Presidents, Kings, Kaisers, 
Arch-bishops, Priests, or even Deacons, unless we be 
compelled in thought to see a bodily visible Christ 
glorified and enthroned in a visible Kingship above 
all Kings. Holy Scripture does not so compel our 
thought : it is not here argued, though it might be, 
that its mere words do not permit such thought. 
There may be a question whether such thought can 
get full permission of itself. 

Yet we must not evaporate away the meaning of 
God's Word. The pre-millennial protest against a 
prevalent dissolving of revealed future facts into 
figures, and against the drowning of sublime Scrip- 
tural Personalities in an insatiable sea of symbolism, 
must be listened to as a protest in the interest of 
faith ; and while we may reject its terms which seem 
to us unscriptural, we must heed its admonition. 

Thus, when it is revealed that with The Lord, living 
and reigning through the Millennial aeon, were the 
blessed and holy of the First Resurrection, we have no 



108 The Millennial Coming. 

right to change these persons into principles or historic 
forces. Nor are we to hold them in our thought re- 
mote from the earth in the highest Heaven (the 
" third heaven " of Saint Paul's vision [il Cor. xii. 2]) 
to which Christ, exalted far above all Heavens (/. c> to 
the highest conceivable Heavenly state) passed when, 
having ascended, He sat down at the right hand of 
God [Heb. vii. 26]. For, we see a procession in the 
heavenly spheres [Rev. xix. n-16]: The King of 
Glory comes with ten-thousands of His saints who 
have gathered to His supreme attraction. The vast 
multitudes, it may well be, of those who are His, yet 
had not up to this time been prepared for the body 
of their glory, but in exceeding comfort and felicity 
and in such heightened vision of Christ as made their 
abode all the heaven of which we can now conceive, 
had been awaiting His fuller Millennial disclosure, to 
enter into their full glorification in Him, are now at 
last made like unto Him, because at last they see Him 
as He is. His mighty Advent brings a resurrection- 
crisis through all the lower Heavens, the Heavens 
which are spiritually nearest this earthly scene. He 
comes, drawing near His earthly Vineyard, His herit- 
age, bringing His saints with Him — in a certain sense 
bringing with Him the whole Heaven down again into 



General Survey. 109 

nearness to His redeemed Church on earth. Great 
judgments attend His approach : it is the beginning 
of the thousand years which with The Lord are as 
one Judgment Day [Ps. xc. 4 : II Pet. iii. 8]. The 
Heavenly and the Earthly Church grow more con- 
scious of their unity with each other. The Church on 
Earth is replenished with the celestial fellowship. It 
beholds itself the veritable out-court of the Heavenly 
Temple. There is communication, not miraculous, 
not unnatural, but according to the ancient and most 
natural law by which faith is itself the highest law. 
Evil withers and flees from before this heavenly re- 
enforcement ; hearts yield ; the nations bow, or if they 
will not bow are dashed in pieces as in a moment like 
potter's vessels ; the very Earth travels an orbit of 
peace. 

History is full of minor premonitory comings of 
The Lord Jesus Christ. The dawn of the Millennium 
marks His last grand premonitory coming. Already 
The Master seems drawing near His purchased pos- 
session. He comes from farthest Heavens, girded 
for war, His vesture dipped in blood, travelling in the 
greatness of His strength, mighty to save. Gradually 
as He advances, welcomed by each successively un- 
folding sphere, the hosts of the holy ones awaking 



no The Millennial Coming. 

to a more full and mighty life, stir themselves, and 
gather to Him Who draws all men unto Him. " His 
going forth is prepared as the morning." Behold, 
He is about at length to enter what have been our 
near bordering Heavens — the first and lowest abode 
of those who have fallen asleep in Jesus — hereafter to 
be lower Heavens no more, but flooded with the same 
Eternal Light and Life that have made the Glory of 
the Presence of the Throne of God and The Lamb, 
and overflowing with that Life and Light and Music 
upon this mortal sphere. Vast moral and spiritual, 
therefore also social and national upheavals, must 
herald and attend His steady approach to our sphere 
of earth and time ; both the good and the ill shall be 
aroused ; affairs shall take on a more spiritual aspect, 
character shall be quickened with profounder impulses, 
and grow electric with higher spiritual forces. Great 
tribulations may first arise, out of which Christ's puri- 
fied people shall emerge in splendid victory. 

Are not the armies already gathering? do not our 
skies already darken with the signals of the battle 
which must issue soon ? Let us watch ! For even 
now, it may be, the royal standard of the Great Cap- 
tain of our Salvation is being lifted up on high, and 
all the heavenly armies are gathering and about to 



General Survey. iii 

set forward on their victorious march, attendant on 
the course of Him Who comes, the Mighty Conqueror, 
to set up the Kingdom that shall have no end. 
For He saith— " Yea ! I Come QUICKLY." 

Let His waiting Church respond — 

"Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!" 



THE 

Coming of The Son Of Man In Final Judgment. 



PART III. 

THE COMING OF THE SON OF MAN IN FINAL 
JUDGMENT. 



I. 

THE CULMINATION OF HISTORY. 

f\N the far horizon of man's thought there floats 
^ always some scene of final Divine Judgment. 
Man's conscience and natural reason have discerned its 
dread through vague outline, and, catching its faint 
echoes, have whispered their syllables in the soul or 
thundered them forth in law. 

Holy Scripture plainly announces such a final 
scene ; and — more convincingly — everywhere involves 
it, quietly refers to it, adjusts itself with reference to 
it : so that we find the beams of that last Hour weav- 
ing themselves in with the light of the Apostles' day, 
darting through the skies of the earlier and the later 
prophecy, piercing the dark of the Patriarchal ages, 
and gleaming in awful fire from the sword that turned 

(i 1 5) 



n6 Christ's Final Judgment. 

swiftly every way to guard the gates of man's lost 
Eden. The downfall of Jerusalem was the Judg- 
ment Day in miniature ; the fire that fell on the 
cities of the plain was but as the spray from its vast 
surge ; the Deluge was its watery emblem ; the 
trumpet and thunder of Sinai were its distant 
reverberations ; the darkness that drifted in on Cal- 
vary, a mystery enfolding a Mystery, was the rolling 
of its black clouds. 

Since the first sin, Judgment has always been pre- 
paring itself, always waiting, always drawing all 
doings and all persons in upon itself, as the Sun is 
resistlessly swinging every planet in slowly lessening 
ellipse till the last and outmost shall crash to the 
imperative centre. Or, changing the figure, we may 
say — it is the Coming Day. Not a moment since 
Adam's first undoing, in which any man of us who 
would stop to listen and would hush his noisy life 
and shut out the vulgar clatter of this little world, 
would not hear its never-ceasing, far-resounding, 
steadily advancing foot-fall. 

Enlarging on the suggestion of an admirable Chris- 
tian thinker, we may outline the ever proceeding and 
cumulative Judgment, somewhat thus : — i) The Judg- 
ment Day, in its essence, began with the beginning 



The Culmination of History. 117 

of the world ; and, for each man, begins at his birth, 
working in hidden laws, yet evidenced and announced 
by conscience and declaring itself in all his higher 
moral nature which is a certain Presence within him 
of Christ The Eternal Word, the " true Light which 
lighteneth every man that cometh into the world : " 
2) The Judgment Day continues in this undeveloped 
state through the man's life, administered within by 
God's Spirit and through conscience, and without by 
God's Truth and Providence ; wherefore it is written 
that the sinner " is condemned already," and that 
the righteous " hath (not only will have) eternal 
Life:" — 3) The Judgment Day rises into a higher 
stage of development for each man at death : — 4) The 
Judgment Day declares itself more fully, and in gen- 
eral throughout both the earthly and spiritual spheres 
of Humanity at Christ's Millennial Coming to open 
the thousand years, which period shall be as one dis- 
tinct and growing Day: — 5) The Judgment Day rises 
to its consummation in the great and final Coming 
of The Son Of Man at the end of the Millennium, 
which Coming and its sentences and discriminations 
are but the manifestation of a Judgment already 
internally ripe: — 6) The Judgment Day projects 
itself as an era of final decision, into the mystery of 



u8 Christ's Final Judgment. 

that eternity which shall fulfill its sentences of recom- 
pense and reward. 

Thus the Great Day is gathering itself from all 
days that precede, and it comes carrying the flashing 
consummation of them all ; like a cloud that first 
faintly gathers its small mass of the size of a man's 
hand in the distant heavens, then grows slowly and 
takes on motion as of a hand stretching forth for 
power, and with each instant's increase accumulates 
from the surrounding air an electrical force, till at 
length by such gradual enlargement of volume it has 
gathered all the skies within its mighty sweep and 
has massed the whole electric energy of the atmos- 
phere — when instantly its silent blackness bursts into 
awful voice and flame, and by a hand not that of 
man is launched from its depths the irresistible bolt 
of fire. In all the air of Time the Judgment-light- 
nings are being accumulated, and ■ u that Day" is 
massing itself in all the broad heavens that arch the 
whole Humanity, with the gathering together of all 
the moral powers and of all the judicial forces that 
have had their place in each separate day of earth's 
long history. Schiller sees certainly the near, whether 
or not the far, horizons when he writes — " The history 
of the world is the Judgment of the world. " 



The Culmination of History. 119 

Hence, those minor Judgment Days which we be- 
hold scattered along all the path of our Race, days in 
which nations or men have been brought to the bar 
of God's awful Providence and there adjudged and 
visited with doom, are in their sternness yet their 
incompleteness, signals and proofs of that Day of God 
whose very air shall be as flame. Making a beginning, 
these days point to a completion. We hear the Great 
Day denied : it is said — men are visited in this life 
for their deeds ; therefore there is no Judgment to 
come : but the proper statement is this rather — men 
are visited even in this life, for their deeds ; low, in- 
complete, unspiritual, temporary as this life is ; thence 
it is evident that a perfect Judgment awaits them in 
that spiritual sphere which is to be freed from all 
fleshly entanglements, and balanced in the perfect 
holiness of God, and finally adjusted for immortality. 
The philosophy of history shows a process of Judg- 
ment ; common observation and experience reveal 
the same : now a process is a process to some point of 
ultimation ; and this utmost point, the culmination 
of all histories, is the General Judgment revealed in 
Holy Scripture. 



II. 

THE SUPREME CRISIS VEILED IN SYMBOLISM. 

The General Judgment is revealed in Holy Scrip- 
ture as a fact, but not as to its methods. Descrip- 
tions are not given or pictures drawn except in an 
outline grand and awful, dimly traced through figures 
and metaphors taken from material things, shadowing 
rather than showing the tremendous scene. Prophets 
and Apostles seem to have been dazzled and over- 
whelmed by their vision of it : they crowd symbol on 
symbol that they may bring it to our thought ; while 
our Lord calling men to note its moral bearings, 
frames the Day in the Divine simplicity of His 
speech. 

Indeed, the Personal Manifestation of The Son Of 
God in fulness of glory and power as final Judge of all 
mankind, involving the Resurrection of the dead, and 
the instantaneous change of those then living from 
their natural into their spiritual bodies, brings noth- 
ing less than the dissolution (so far at least as con- 
cerns all connection with the human Race) of the 
(120) 



The Crisis Veiled. 121 

whole system of material nature: thus it lies utterly 
outside all the possible reach of our present knowl- 
edge and quite transcends description. Yet since the 
great Event must be cast into some form by which it 
may be grasped by the human mind, it appears in the 
Bible under the figure of a Day of Assize with its seat 
of Judgment and its solemn assemblage, adjudication 
and sentence : though we must remember that in the 
use of this whole figure we are seeing " through a glass 
darkly" facts too vast and too remote from all our 
present knowledge to be either set forth in our words 
or comprehended in our thought. The Scriptural 
figures of the Judgment are addressed mainly to the 
imagination and to the moral sense : thence it may 
be that a literal acceptance as the ultimate truth, of 
that which is given us only as a figurative intimation 
of the unutterable, has generated some thoughts that 
have solidified into doctrines about the Judgment 
Day, which beside being without warrant in the Word 
have been made stumbling-blocks by unbelief. 

Multitudes who cannot fully disbelieve the final 
general Judgment are trying to disbelieve it, and are 
succeeding so far as to weaken its power upon their 
consciences,«by dwelling on the absurdities and magni- 
fying the difficulties which a critical thought easily 
6 



122 Christ's Final Judgment. 

discovers in some of the common declarations con- 
cerning it. But he who, because men, good men, 
have strained into an absurd literalness of doctrine 
the figures of God's judgment, thinks himself philo- 
sophical in losing his faith in it as a certain fact, is in- 
deed far more unphilosophical than if he had taken 
the most indefensible statements of it which are ac- 
cepted by the most ignorant minds and had held them 
with the firmest clasp of his conviction : at least he 
would not then have sunk out of vision of the grand 
fact itself in some sea of cold criticism or of a boister- 
ous arrogance that called itself reason. Faith may- 
degenerate into credulity; but a materialistic unbe- 
lief begins in a credulity which seems almost a mira- 
cle of folly. 

Yet the errors on this theme are harmful : we 
should strive to cast out of our minds all fallacious 
and degrading notions concerning it. These false 
notions seem to originate mostly in a materializing 
of the Event, as though it wete to occur somewhere 
on the earth's surface, or in the atmospheric region, 
or in the visible heavens, or in some place such as 
can be marked and bounded by matter with which 
we are familiar. 

Let it be considered then, that in the Judgment 



The Crisis Veiled. 123 

scene no flesh and blood shall be present, no mortal 
bodies, no form of matter of which we now know 
anything. The vast populations of the earth will 
not be gathered on one geographical spot, or upborne 
on such clouds of vapor as now float in our skies: 
the whole realm of visible nature shall have been 
dissolved — the very earth and skies having fled away 
so that no place was found for them; the elements 
themselves having melted as with fervent heat, and 
all the heavens having rolled together like a scroll 
and vanished like a mist. 

The scene of Judgment will undoubtedly be a 
place, and a place more real than any place of which 
. we now know ; but because of that higher and inte- 
rior realness it transcends all our present thought : it 
will be a place in a spiritual world — in that spiritual 
world which surrounds and interpenetrates this sphere 
of visible matter, and which is the real world of 
which this material is the real emblem — in the spirit- 
ual world in which all force originates and from 
which all life proceeds, and from which by continual 
inflow along the channels of natural laws this out- 
ward sphere in which our bodies transiently live is 
maintained in that duly systematized force and action 
which we call Nature, our name for an unsolved secret. 



124 Christ's Final Judgment. 

The processes of the Judgment will be not those 
of a trial at any earthly bar: no formal accusers 
there, or legal advocates ; for the great Accuser shall 
have no voice in that august Presence of holy Love ; 
and the Great Advocate shall have at last ascended 
His throne of glorious power and light, to discrim- 
inate with final, penetrating, instantaneous decision, 
His foes and friends : no witnesses summoned to 
reveal the facts of character which shall reveal them- 
selves in the all-pervading light that shall lay open 
the secrets of all hearts — facts which indeed shall 
burst into self-revelation according to spiritual laws 
which we now faintly conceive : no arguments, de- 
bates, excuses, appeals, legal formalities of any sort ; 
in short, no trial, since life has been the trial ; but 
simply Judgment, the ultimate discriminations and 
decisions of that perfect Justice which is perfect 
Love. 

The Day of Judgment will be not a day of earthly 
Time and planetary revolution ; for Time shall then 
have begun to be merged and whelmed in the Eter- 
nity of whose measureless ocean the years are but as 
the flying spray ; the earth, great pendulum of the 
solar clock whose swing through space marks off 
the passing periods, shall then have been clean re- 



The Crisis Veiled. 125 

moved away: therefore when the Word tells us of 
the " Day " of Judgment, its meaning is as when we 
speak of the Day of sorrow or of joy, the Day of 
grace, the Day of probation : it means simply the 
period of Judgment — a period which no man shall 
measure by the hour-hand of his watch ; a period 
which, for all that we can know, may be absolutely 
instantaneous, or may seem indefinitely prolonged. 

It is sometimes said that the Judgment will be 
open before the assembled Universe. Surely it 
will be open infinitely, and there will be an assem- 
bling ; but he who talks of the assembled Universe 
— all inhabitants of all the countless worlds from the 
beginning, with all angels, and all demons — must use 
his words in that loose figurative and poetic sense in 
which they may be allowable ; since the Word asserts 
no such thing, and we are not in any knowledge 
which enables us to assert it. The human Race shall 
gather to the Coming of its Head and its Judge on 
Whose glorious state holy angels shall be attendant : 
these things we know, for Christ asserts them : what 
man knows more ? 

The Judge will be The Son Of Man, the Eternal 
Word Of God in Human Personality, Whose Being 
stands in the profoundest personal relation to every 



126 Christ's Final Judgment. 

human soul. This is a glorious mystery, which has 
full assertion from Christ's own lips, and which gives 
to the Judgment scene which centres in Him, that 
strange mingling of power and gentleness, of magis- 
tracy and brotherhood, and that surpassingly awful 
majesty of meekness, which everywhere pertain to 
the Presence and Person of The Son Of Man. The 
Judgment is His. "That Day" is 

"The Day of Christ." 



III. 

THE CONSUMMATION OF NATURE. 

The Day of Christ is the point of Christ's utmost 
Coming. It can be no other than the point of final 
restitution of all things. It is the manifestation of 
the judgment of God ; therefore the crisis of con- 
summation. For Christ is God manifest in judging 
as He has been God manifest in creating, as He is 
God manifest in redeeming. He who questions how 
Christ can bring the very judgment of God, needs to 
take note of the fact that it is impossible for a man 
to conceive of any Judgment scene whatever in 
which there shall be any manifestation before men of 
God as the Judge, without clothing God in His 
thought in some shape of Humanity; and the name 
of God when He reveals Himself as shaped in hu- 
man thought, is Christ. Wherefore it is the word of 
our Lord Himself [Jn. v. 22, 27] — "The Father judg- 
eth no man, but hath committed all Judgment unto 
The Son, that all men should honor The Son even as 

they honor The Father :" .... "And hath given 

(127) 



128 Christ's Final Judgment. 

Him authority to execute Judgment also, because He 
is The Son Of Man." 

This ultimate Coming of The Lord — as it must 
bring the culmination of human history, and end the 
long procession of the ages, and overwhelm Time as 
with the in-rushing ocean of Eternity — so must it 
bring the restitution of all things. It is the very 
" regeneration" [Mat. xix. 28: Acts iii. 21: Col. i. 
20] of the material earth and of the heavens as well, 
so far as these have been the abodes of human souls. 
Like all great acts of restitution or renewal after long 
delay, it shall come to all unready souls as catastrophe, 
with amazing suddenness. Yet, like all catastrophe 
under God's government, it shall be the absolutely 
natural Event ; and through all its awful grandeur it 
shall shine as blessing and as beauty to Christ's 
Flock ; for it shall be the coming of the Restorer to 
rebuild all things on enduring foundations [Lk. xxi. 
28]. Its burst upon the world will kindle some mid- 
night into flame, or drown the pale thiil sunshine 
which makes our brightest day, in that infinite del- 
uging light which is the Presence of The Son Of 
God. 

The Son Of Man in His former Advent, was mani- 



The Consummation of Nature. 129 

fest in the Flesh, veiling His glory, restraining His 
power. Therefore the wheels of outward nature still 
moved on : matter was not greatly disturbed, or the 
system of natural laws ; for He made Himself to be 
"under the law" like His brethren whom He came 
to save. The earth indeed gave some signs of an 
unusual Divine Presence ; Nature seemed standing as 
though somewhat doubtful, and waiting for His word 
which then at any instant might have summoned the 
angelic legions, and loosed the seven thunders, and 
dissolved the earth and heavens, and opened the 
abodes of departed spirits, and brought into Judg- 
ment the quick and the dead. The waters of Galilee 
knowing the tread of " Him Whose goings forth had 
been from of old, from everlasting, ,, set themselves 
for a highway to His feet ; bread multiplied itself to 
feed the thousands at His hands Who was Himself 
the Bread of God, the Manna in the wilderness ; at 
His touch the sick were healed and at His word the 
dead came forth. The heavens could not quite re- 
strain themselves; angels burst into song above His 
little Bethlehem ; from their tabernacles in the Para- 
dise of God came Moses and Elijah in dazzling glory 
on the mount of His Transfiguration ; at His hour 

of dying the sun was darkened, the earth quaked; 
6* 



130 Christ's Final Judgment. 

and many of the Saints that had been sleeping in 
death, arose at His rising and appeared to many in 
the holy City; the angels of His power came to 
attend and declare the glory of His Resurrection and 
Ascension. Thus Nature — the whole frame of things 
— seems to have felt some slight shock or tremor 
in that first surprising coming of The Son Of God in 
a personal Humanity, and to have been continually 
looking toward Him in expectancy, awaiting His 
word, His mere beckon, to yield itself back into His 
creative hand and to flee away into its proper 
nothingness before His face ; while the throngs of 
evil spirits whom He dislodged from the bodies of 
men their victims, and whom He ordered back to 
their restraint in the Abyss, loudly confessed His 
Glory even while they blasphemed it. But He, The 
Son Of Man, standing serene and wonderful amid 
the wide disquiet, soothed, calmed, as it were encour- 
aged Nature and the material world, assuring them 
that not yet was the time ripe for the departure of 
the earth and heavens, while He strait ly sternly 
charged the demons that they should not too fully 
make Him known. This was the self-restraint and 
the self-veiling of the Divine patience. 

But when He shall come the second time, it shall 



The Consummation of Nature. 131 

be the Day of His Glory, in which He shall be not 
veiled, but revealed from the highest Heaven, and the 
material things shall vanish and be as though they 
had never been. What we call Nature, real and in- 
dispensable as it is for the purpose for which Christ 
now administers it, is evidently a transient organism 
correspondent to the body of man which it enspheres 
and conveys. It is a beautifully adjusted system of 
check and balance and flow, through which may pass 
and act with limitations needful for our mortal exist- 
ence, that supernatural life which, given at first from 
The Son Of God, and moment by moment continued 
from Him, is ever working through all the immense 
mechanism of visible things ; so that the most com- 
mon and familiar facts in all the world around us, are 
yet the hiding-places of an eternal mystery, and the 
most ordinary natural processes are full charged with 
a supernatural and immeasurable power. All the 
course of Nature is but the course of the Divine 
manifestation in the sphere of Humanity : in the Day 
when that manifestation shall stand complete, Hu- 
manity will have no farther use for such materials 
and forces: they shall have reached their ultimate. 
Christ comes : they vanish away : 
Lo ! the new Heavens and a new Earth ! 



IV. 

THE ULTIMATE OF RESURRECTION. 

In the same Day when it shall be said — " Lo ! the 
new Heavens and a new Earth ! " The Son Of Man 
shall bring Resurrection to its ultimate point. It is 
revealed, not that He Who is always " The Resurrec- 
tion and The Life " begins the work of resurrection 
then, but that in that Day He completes it. That is the 
Day when Death, long dying, dies ; and Destruction 
is itself destroyed. In the brightness of His mani- 
festation of Himself as The Life of Humanity, all 
Humanity to its last, most backward portion, awakes 
into full moral and natural self-consciousness ; and in 
the case of each individual, takes on such appropriate 
organism as evidently belongs to each as its own 
"spiritual body." Each rises into his own full moral 
and natural personality as a human being, with all 
which that involves or needs for its full development. 

Resurrection through Christ shall have been pro- 
ceeding for the thousand years, or through the Mil- 
lennial aeon, before the final Day. For, multitudes of 
(132) 



The Ultimate of Resurrection. 133 

Christ's followers will doubtless pass from earth dur- 
ing the Millennium which is to open with a glorious 
Coming of Christ in His Spiritual Personality to His 
Church in the Heavens, gathering His departed saints 
in " the First Resurrection," assembling them as rulers 
with Him in the heavenly spheres, and preparing the 
ten-thousand times ten-thousand of them to come 
with Him in glory in the grand consummating Day. 
Thus already the Church on high is with Christ in 
Resurrection, already blessed and holy and beyond 
the reach of death ; and to their number death trans- 
fers from the Millennial Church below, which also 
has begun to feel the mighty stir of The Lord's ap- 
proach, myriads of believers to whom death can be 
only the instantaneous beginning of their Resurrec- 
tion Life in the presence of Christ. The Millennial 
era may be conceived as from first to last one grand 
progressive cumulative Resurrection Day, rising to- 
ward the fulness of Christ's Manifestation when in 
the Last Revealing Hour, He shall reach with His 
awakening light the last and weakest and most re- 
mote and least conscious of His sheep [Mat. xxv. 
37-39], and draw them unto Him, together with 
every other soul of man from earth or from the infer- 
nal spheres that shall not already have heard and 



134 Christ's Final Judgment. 

known His voice and sped on wings of love to meet 
Him. But most blessed are they who wake and rise 
to meet their Lord in the Morning of the Resurrec- 
tion. 

But the Millennial aeon ends, merging into the 
final Judgment. In that Day all tribes and hosts of 
Earth shall gather to The Son Of Man, willingly or 
unwillingly, swept in upon the current of a resistless 
law of life which plays from Him through all the pos- 
sible bounds of humanity. It is written [Hag. ii. 6, 2 1 : 
Heb. xii. 26, 27 : Mat. xxiv. 29, etc.,'] that the trumpet 
of that Day shall shake not the earth only, but also 
the heavens ; and the heavens and the earth, the 
fleshly and spiritual spheres alike shall dissolve at the 
sound, and yield up all their dwellers to The Lord. 
Hades — region of the dead under the old Dispensa- 
tion (we have no revelation of its occupancy as an in- 
termediate state of souls since Christ's Resurrection) 
— shall be broken up : Hell shall be searched as with 
living flame: no darkness or shadow of death shall 
there be in all the Universe where one soul may hide. 
Christ's all-pervading Presence shall fill the universe 
of human existence ; and in His piercing and insuffer- 
able light, each soul shall instantly appear unshielded, 
undisguised, struck through and through to the in- 



The Ultimate of Resurrection. 135 

nermost haunts and lurking-places of character and 
motive by those infinite beams of truth which are to 
be as a limitless atmosphere of glory proceeding forth 
from The Son Of God. 

As a scene or as an event, in all features, elements, 
forces, personalities, the Judgment Day centres in the 
infinitely dominating Person of The Christ. 



V. 

THE CONSUMMATE PERSONAL DISCRIMINATION. 

Inasmuch as the Infinite Person of The Christ of 
God dominates the Day of Final Judgment, each hu- 
man person shall then be discriminated according to 
his profound moral and voluntary relation to Christ. 
In that Judgment, nothing whatever shall be decided 
on any mechanical, formal or legal ground : the deci- 
sion and the sentence shall flow from a vital sphere — 
the sphere of the real and personal life. The Book of 
Life of The Lamb Of God Who was slain from the 
foundation of the world shall be opened [Rev. xiii. 8 : 
xx. 12]: is the man's name written therein? is his 
life at its inmost in union with the Life of God, the 
Eternal Lamb, the Eternal Sacrificial Love ? 

Vain therefore is our questioning how all deeds of 
a long life shall then be remembered and recounted ? 
Nothing whatever shall be remembered then, and 
everything then shall recount itself. Everything of 
the past shall be seen, because under that stimulant 

light, the whole history of each soul shall flash into 

(136) 



The Consummate Discrimination. 137 

instant revelation ; whereby memory itself shall no 
longer be memory, as in the dull twilight of this world ; 
but shall be changed to be a vision of all the past of 
action and of character as present because indelibly 
wrought into the being of the soul which now blazes 
into manifestation. Each soul shall find itself in the 
presence of Christ, not for questioning, not for testi- 
mony, but in total revelation of its inmost self — all 
its past having ultimated and come to final fruit in a 
certain character and a certain relation to the Divine 
Person, which character and relation shall then ap- 
pear, emerging from all clouds, hiding no longer in 
any labyrinth of self-delusions. To the Right-hand — 
to the Left-hand : Christ's award to each soul shall be 
the soul's spontaneous award unto itself. The Divine 
Judgment w r ill be so perfect a registration of fact and 
of life, that every man will seem to be judging him- 
self. 

To the Right-hand — to the Left-hand : this shows 
the central Personality of The Judge, as it shows all 
persons as discriminated then according to their rela- 
tion to The Son Of Man, under the touch of Whose 
supreme light of truth, all character shall spring to 
follow its long-concealed affinities — moving to the 
right, to the left, self-discriminative, self-decisive, self- 



138 Christ's Final Judgment. 

consummating. The point of division for all men, to 
the Right, to the Left, to the golden gates of glory, 
to the iron gates of doom, shall be for each on the 
answer to this single question — How does this soul 
stand in reference to Christ, as it stands in His search- 
ing Presence, with all its past made present, with its 
hidden life unfolded ? 

This will be the test for the heathen as well as for 
the nominally Christian ; for it is not at all a question 
as to intellectual knowledge or doctrinal view : it is 
the far deeper question as to the heart and character. 
Those from Christian lands, who from their infancy 
found themselves surrounded by Christ as by the air, 
who saw Him historically revealed in His Word and 
in His Church — how did they regulate themselves in 
reference to Him as a recognized Person ? Those 
from heathen lands who never heard even His Name 
— how did they regulate themselves in reference to 
that Eternal Christ Of God Who though unrecog- 
nized by them in His historical Person, might yet have 
been recognized by them, and must unavoidably have 
been in some sense known to them, in that deep 
pervasive life in which He lives in all Humanity of 
which He is the Head ? For since Christ is in the world 
from the beginning ; since all man's higher reason and 



The Consummate Discrimination. 139 

moral faculty and spiritual vision, is but the mysteri- 
ous Presence in him of The Eternal Word ; since this 
natural Presence of The Son Of God belongs to every 
man that God ever made, as God's birth-day gift to 
him ; since, though a man might know not God's 
written Word or law, or the historical Christ of the 
Gospels Who came in the Flesh in Judaea, neverthe- 
less he could not avoid knowing this earlier law un- 
written, this manifestation of Christ in his own being, 
and must have been able to recognize the same in his 
brother-man — therefore he also, though in darkest 
heathenism, must have come at some time into a cer- 
tain personal relation toward the Christ Of God, and 
must have either fulfilled or refused such duties as 
were known to him in that relation. 

It is to be considered that no man shall n.eed to 
have Christ pointed out to him in that Day : every 
man shall recognize Him as One either familiarly or 
dimly seen before, or at least as One Who might have 
been seen had not the soul refused to look toward 
the Light. 

" From the East and the West and the North and 
the South," from the wide heathen realms, it may 
well be that many shall come to sit down with Christ 
in His Kingdom [Mat. xix. 30: Mk. x. 31 : Lk. xiii. 



140 Christ's Final Judgment. 

29, 30]. Many to whose conscious vision The Lord 
shall then for the first time be revealed in His dis- 
tinct Person — many whose hearts nevertheless, awak- 
ened and led of The Holy Spirit, had sought for 
Him and groped after Him in pagan darkness ; and 
who not finding Him in any clear manifestation had 
yet become aware of that half-seen Presence with 
which He manifests Himself in every man that lives; 
and then glad in even that dim sight of their majestic 
Lord, had showed their love for Him by giving bread 
to their brother-man in hunger, and drink to one 
athirst, and sympathy to one in sorrow — to their 
brother and to His — these, heathen though they 
outwardly were, were in their deep and real life, the 
lovers of Christ and the followers of Christ : they 
loved all the Christ that they knew or could find in 
their own souls or in their brethren. At last in the 
Day of Christ's full disclosure to all souls, these 
shall recognize Him as none other than that Son Of 
God and Son Of Man Whom they had sought, not 
knowing Whom they sought, and Whom they in 
their poor fashion had served in the dark : in a half- 
unconscious response to His supreme discrimination of 
them, they find themselves gathering to the company 
at the Right-hand [Mat. xxv. 32, 33] ; yet they 



The Consummate Discrimination. 141 

scarce know who or where they are, so late in the 
Resurrection Day has their full spiritual awakening 
come : this they know — they are in a new, amazing 
and yet most natural light : but this is the time not 
for debate within themselves ; it is the instant for 
supreme decision : to the Left ? one glance thither 
shows them that nothing there has any right in them 
or claim upon them or fitness to them : to the Right ? 
behold, their hearts are drawing them thither, and 
the angels are welcoming them there, and The Lord 
Himself smiles on them there, and says — " Come, 
ye blessed of My Father ": -" for I was hungry, 
and ye gave Me meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave 
Me drink." Then their thoughts answer and say 
— " Lord ! when saw we Thee hungry, or athirst, 
or sick, or in prison, and ministered unto Thee?" 
For these souls are judging themselves— so charged 
with judicial forces is the very atmosphere of that 
Day of The Lord Jesus, so naturally does that Last 
Judgment proceed from and exercise itself through 
the action of the persons that are judged. But the 
face of The Son Of Man over-rules their self-judging, 
beaming on them with that dimly remembered 
sweetness, which they feel that somewhere they have 
seen before, on some upturned face of one in trouble 



142 Christ's Final Judgment. 

whom they have comforted, or of worn wayfarer 
whom they have helped on earth's dusty paths : 
through the gate of that memoiy The Lord leads 
them into full spiritual consciousness and self-posses- 
sion ; and with their whole souls bursting into glad 
surprise, and all the secret springs of character within 
them flaming into a Christ-like revelation before un- 
known even to themselves, they hear Him say — 
" Verily, I say unto you : Inasmuch as ye have done 
it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye 
have done it unto Me." And these also enter into 
the Life Eternal, because The Lord Who searches 
narrowly that He may lose no one man whom He 
can save, is not ashamed to own any one such poor 
soul long kept in blindness by the Devil, belated in 
the Resurrection by reason of ignorance and infirmi- 
ty, yet from of old longing after God, feeling after 
Him, obeying and trusting such Christ as he knew, 
and now at last bursting into the sudden blossom of 
love and trust on this long-hindered harvest-day. 
And the angels shall rejoice with singing. 

In the same all-revealing Day of Christ, one whose 
birth and training and life were amid the great Divine 
gifts which cluster in Christian lands around the Gos- 
pel of the crucified and risen Son Of God — finding 



The Consummate Discrimination. 143 

himself borne in swift and sudden presentation before 
the Judgment Presence, shall awake as in Resurrec- 
tion under the light of Christ, to the fact that he has 
not believed on, loved or served The Son Of God 
Whom he has seen in historic Personality in the writ- 
ten Word. Was he a confessed disciple of The Lord 
Jesus? or was he an open neglecter of Christ's whole 
offer and claim ? Whatever he may outwardly have 
been, he is in this Light to show whether his inmost 
character is in accordance or at variance with that of 
Christ. He is here to be made conscious of himself 
— of his real self, to be made aware where he belongs, 
and to be put in full possession of himself in his ac- 
complished probation. Behold ! he judges himself: if 
he begin with the old self-deceptions, these refuges 
fail him at the revealing word of Christ. If forgetting 
that this is Resurrection Day, he fall to rehearsing 
those spiritual dreams with which he soothed himself 
when in the Flesh, lo ! they flit away like dreams at 
the blaze of day. What though his character was var- 
nished with a charity whose substance was selfishness, 
or perhaps with a devoutness whose essence was hy- 
pocrisy? These and all disguises shrivel in the con- 
suming glare of truth. Can he with his heart fully 
disclosed in all its deep selfishness, its unchastened 



144 Christ's Final Judgment. 

pride, its carelessness of God, its unlikeness to Christ, 
claim that he belongs in the company at the Right- 
hand? A horrible fascination — that sorcery of evil 
to which he has habitually yielded his will — draws 
him resistlessly toward the company of the Christless. 
Make way for him, ye heathen ! who having sinned 
without the written law perish also without law, and 
whose iniquity and therefore whose doom are far 
lighter than his : Make way for this soul for whom 
Christ died, ye evil Spirits ! to whom no Savior came : 
he can teach you a sin you never knew : this man re- 
jected The Son Of God, and even now and here re- 
jects Him. To the Left-hand ! and thence through 
awful gates sealed evermore against any return which 
is revealed or which we are able to foresee — dread por- 
tals in essaying whose passage, hope itself whose nat- 
ure it is to try all flights, and which spreads its wing 
to follow even this strange career of an immortal soul, 
falls stifled and dead, and so far as we can trace, seems 
to have its resurrection into despair. 

That final Day is incomprehensible ; but its work 
and its results shall be fully recognizable. When it has 
passed, it will be seen to have been the Day in which 
every man has executed upon himself the Judgment 



The Consummate Discrimination. 145 

of Christ, by perfecting and fulfilling his own deepest 
moral choice, and by going exactly where he belongs 
in the vast spiritual spheres. The men that here have 
not received within them The Son Of Man Who is 
the Christ Of God, and have refused to follow Him, 
are the men that shall there refuse to follow Him and 
shall not be with Him : the " outer darkness " is more 
a Heaven to them, than it would be Heaven to them 
to be with Christ as to their inmost and constant life. 
The men that here have been drawn after The Son 
Of God in love and faith, shall be manifested there 
as His Sheep : they shall know His voice as of old : 
they shall hear Him calling them in love, and shall 
follow Him, that where He is, there they may be also. 
It is Heaven. 



The Judgment Day passing and closing, merges 
into the Everlasting. Jesus The Christ, The Son Of 
Man, The Son Of The Living God, shall say — " It is 
done: I am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and 
the End." The Coming of Him " Who was, and is, 
and is to come/' shall have consummated itself so far 
as concerns the history of man in this world — con- 
summated itself, and man with it, in " the new Heav- 
ens and the new Earth." 
7 



146 Christ's Final Judgment. 

" Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in 
the Kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, 
let him hear! " 



" Behold ! a great multitude which no man could 
number, out of all nations and tribes and peoples and 
tongues, standing before the Throne and before The 
Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their 
hands ; and they cry with a great voice, saying — 

"The Salvation to our God Who sitteth 
upon the Throne, and unto The Lamb!" 

" And all the Angels were standing round the 
Throne and the Elders and the four Living Ones, 
and they fell before the Throne on their faces and 
worshipped God, saying — 

" Amen ! 

" The Blessing and the Glory and the Wis- 
dom and the Thanksgiving and the Honor 
and the Power and the Might, unto our God 
to the ages of the ages ! 

AMEN ! " 



The Historic Origin of the Bible. 

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Apocrypha. By Rev. Edward Cone Bissell, A.M. 
With an Introduction by Prof. Roswell D. Hitch- 
cock, D.D., of the Union Theological Seminary, 
N. Y. One vol., small 8vo, 455 pp. $2.00. 

.From the Kev. WILLIAM S. TYLER, D.D., LL.D., 

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Sent by mail, prepaid, on receipt of the price, $2.00. 



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Published by ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & CO., 
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